
Qass t i~-^ i 



Book 



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THE PHILOLOGY 



Siff 



ENGLISH TONGUE 



JOHN EARLE, M.A. 

RECTOR OF SWANSWICK 

Formerly Feliow and Tutor of Oriel College, and sotnetime Professor of 

Anglo-Saxo7i in the University of Oxford 



AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
M DCCC LXXI 

\_All rights reserved'] 






Hoution 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 




PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF 



I 



PREFACE. 



Philology may be described as a science of language 
based upon the comparison of languages. It is the aim of 
Philology to order the study of language upon principles 
indicated by language itself, so that each part and function 
shall have its true and natural place assigned to it, according 
to the order, relation, and proportion dictated by the nature 
of language. What the nature of language is, can be ascer- 
tained only by a wide comparison of languages taken at 
various stages of development. Such a work is to be per- 
formed, not by any one man, but by the co-operation of 
many : and many have now been co-operating this three 
quarters of a century past, and sending in from every land 
their contributions towards it. «■ 

In this newly gotten knowledge of human language there 
is matter for educational use. The relations of language to 
culture are so intimate that what betters our knowledge of 
the one should improve the process of the other. It is an 
open question in what way the lessons of language may best 
be converted to the purpose of education, but there is one 
fault which might at least be somewhat mended: — our know- 
ledge of language has been too broken and divided : we 
have most of us known one language best vernacularly, and 
another best grammatically. Something would be gained 
if our cultivation of language could be rather more centred 
upon the mother tongue, so that our vernacular and our 



IV ^ PREFACE. 

philological acquirements might more effectually support one 
another. The lessons of philology would be taught more 
. thoroughly, as well as more conveniently, if the materials for 
the instruction were supplied by the mother tongue. The 
effect of philological study is to quicken the perception of 
analogy between languages ; and this advantage would be 
more immediate in its returns if our philology were more 
based on the mother tongue. Nothing would put the learner 
so readily or so implicitly in possession of all the essence 
of philological gains ; nothing would be of such good prac- 
tical avail when the knowledge of one language was needed 
to bear on the acquisition of another. Were the English 
language studied philologically, the faculty of acquiring other 
languages would soon be more generally an English faculty. 

There are two chief ways of entering upon a scientific 
study. One is by the way of Principles, and the other is by 
the way of Elements. If the learner approaches Philology 
by the way of principles, it is necessary that the principles 
should be familiarised to him by the aid of examples and 
illustrations drawn from various languages. Each of the 
methods excels in its own peculiar way ; and the excellence 
of this method is, that the subject is presented with the 
greatest fullness and totality of effect — as a mountain is 
most imposing to the view on its most precipitous side. 
But it has this great drawback, — that the learner can ill 
judge of the examples ; he must take them on authority ; 
and so far forth as the instruction is based on facts which 
are not within the cognisance of the learner, the teaching 
is unscientific. 

The other method is by the examination of a single lan- 
guage ; and here the course of treatment follows the order 
of natural growth, introducing the principles in an occasional 
and incidental manner, just as they happen to be called for 



PREFACE. y 

in the course of the investigation. If the object-language be 
the learner's own vernacular, this course will be something 
like climbing a mountain by the side where the slope is 
easiest. When this path is chosen, the complete and com- 
pact view of principles as a whole will be deferred until such 
time as the learner shall have reached them severally by 
means of facts which He within his own experience. It is 
upon this, which may be called the Elementary method, that 
the present manual has been constructed ; the aim of which 
has been to find a path through most familiar ground up to 
philological principles. > 

It was assumed at starting that the English language would 
furnish examples of all that is most typical in human speech, 
and it has been the reward of the labourer in this instance 
that his anticipation of the fecundity of his material has been 
most abundantly and even unexpectedly verified.' 

I owe thanks for help to various friends, and to two more 
especially, for perusing and annotating my sheets — affording 
me thereby not only useful hints, but also a support and 
encouragement that they probably had little intention of. 
The excellent verbal Index is the work of H. N. Harvey, Esq., 
of the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton ; and while it 
is the most valuable addition that this handbook could have 
received, it is by me still more highly esteemed as a new 
token of an old friendship. . 



CONTENTS. 



Historic Sketch of the Rise and Formation of the English 



i-,AINUUAUJi 

Chapter I. 


On the English Alphabet 


99 


Chapter II. 


Spelling and Pronunciation 


121 


Chapter III. 


Of Interjections 


158 


Chapter IV. 


Of the Parts of Speech .... 


176 


Chapter V. 


Of Presentive and Symbolic Words, and oi 






Inflections 


193 


Chapter VI. 


The Verbal Group 


224 




I. Strong Verbs .... 


228 




2. Mixed Verbs 


246 




3. Weak Verbs 


253 




4. Verb Making .... 


256 


Chapter VII. 


The Noun Group 


261 




I. Of the Substantive 


265 




2. Of the Adjective .... 


321 




3. Of the Adverb .... 


359 




§ The Numerals 


381 


Chapter VIII. 


The Pronoun Group 


387 




I. Substantival Pronouns . 


390 




2. Adjectival Pronouns 


408 




3. Adverbial Pronouns 


417 



VIU 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Link- Word Group 434 

1. Of Prepositions 435 

2. Of Conjunctions ..... 444 
Of Syntax 460 

1. Flat or CoUocative Syntax . . .461 

2. Syntax of Flexion 474 

3. Syntax by Symbolic Words . . -487 

Of Compounds 501 

1. Compounds of the First Order . . 504 

2. Compounds of the Second Order . .510 

3. Compounds of the Third Order . -513 
Chapter XII. Of Prosody, or the Musical Element in Speech . 516 

1. Of Sound as an Illustrative Agency . 519 

2. Of Sound as a Formative Agency . '536 

3. Of Sound as an Instinctive Object of 

Attraction 542 



Chapter IX. 



Chapter X. 



Chapter XL 



HISTORIC SKETCH 
OF THE RISE AND FORMATION 

OF THE 

ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The first thing in the description of a language is its 
affinities with other languages : and the consideration of 
this belongs to what is called Comparative Philology. The 
English is one of the languages of the great Indo-European 
family, the members of which have been traced across the 
double continent of Asia and Europe through the Sanscrit, 
Persian, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Gothic, and Keltic lan- 
guages. In order to illustrate the right of our English 
language to a place in this series, it will suffice to exhibit 
a few proofs of definite relationship between our language 
on the one hand, and the classical languages of Greece and 
Italy on the other. The readiest illustration of this is to be 
found in the transition of consonants. When the same words 
appear under altered forms in different members of the 
same family of languages, the diversity of form is found 
to have a regular method and analogy. Such an analogy 
has been established between the varying consonants which 

B 



'2, SKETCH OF THE RISE 

hold analogous positions in cognate languages, and their 
variation has been reduced to rule by the German philo- 
loger Jacob Grimm. He has founded the law of consonantal 
transition, or consonantal equivalents. A few easy examples 
will put the reader in possession of the nature of the thing. 
When a Welshman speaks Enghsh in Shakspeare he often 
substitutes p for b, as Fluellen in Henry V. act v. sc. i : 
' pragging knave, Pistoll, which you and your self and all 
the world know to be no petter than a fellow, looke you 
now, of no merits : hee is come to me, and prings me pread 
and sault yesterday, looke you, and bid me eate my leeke,' 
&c. The Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans, in Merry Wives, 
puts T for D : 'it were a goot motion' — ' The tevil and his 
tarn' — and ' worts' for words, as : 

'Evans. Pauca verba; {^\x Johii) good worts. 
Falstaffe. Good worts .? good cabidge.' 
Likewise f for v: 'It is that ferry^person for all the orld ' ; 
and ' fidelicet' for videhcet — ' I most fehemently desire 
you,' &c. 

Between closely cognate languages an interchange of this 
sort often exhibits great system and regularity. Everybody 
knows that Hebrew and Chaldee are cognate languages. 
Between them there is a well-marked interchange of z and 
D ; while a third dialect, which we may call Phoenician, 
would in the same place put a t. The Hebrew pronoun 
for this is zeh; but in Chaldee it becomes daa and 
DEN and Di : the Hebrew word for male is zakae ; but in 
Chaldee it appears as dekar : the Hebrew verb to sacrifice 
is zavach; but in Chaldee it is devach: the Hebrew 
verb for being timid is zachal ; but in Chaldee it is 
DECHAL. But if we compare Hebrew with the third 
dialect we get t for z. The Hebrew word for rock is 
zooR or TsooR, after which a famous Phoenician city seated 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 3 

on a rock was called Zok, as it is always called in the Old 
Testament; but this word sounded in Greek ears from 
Phoenician mouths so as to cause them to write it Tvpos, 
Tyrus, whence we have the name of Tyre. The same word 
(probably) passing with an early migration westward is 
found in the Dartmoor Tors. It is to this sort of play upon 
the gamut or scale of consonants, a play which is kept up 
between kindred dialects, that Grimm, when he had reduced 
it to a sort of law, gave the name of Lautverschiehung ; 
sound-shunting of consonantal equivalents ; reciprocity of 
consonants. \^' 

As, on the one side, we find this reciprocity where we 
find cognate dialects; so on the other hand, if we can 
establish the fact that there is or has been such a con- 
sonantal reciprocity between two languages, we have ob- 
tained the strongest proof of their relationship. There are 
traces of this kind between the English on the one hand 
and the Classical languages on the other. ' 

We suppose the reader is familiar with the twofold divi- 
sion of the mute consonants into lip, tooth, and throat 
consonants in the one direction ; and into thin, middle, and 
aspirate consonants in the other direction. If not, he should 
learn this little table by heart, before he proceeds a step 
further. Learn it by rote, both ways, both horizontally and 
vertically. . 



Lip. 

Thin p 

Middle b 

Aspii'ate f 



Tooth. 
t 
d 
]i or "^ or th 



Throat. 

cor'k 

g 

h (Saxon). 



By means of these classifications of consonants we are 
able to shew traces of a law of transition having existed 

B 2 



4 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

between English and the Classical languages. We find 
instances of words, for example, which begin with a thin 
consonant in Greek or Latin or both, and the same word 
is found in English or its cognate dialects beginning with 
an aspirate. Thus if the Latin or Greek word begins with 
p the English word begins with f. Examples : Trvp and 
fire: npo, irpatTos, primus, compared with the Saxon w^ords 
fruma,frem; with the modern preposition _/r<?z?z, which is of 
the same root and original sense with for^ fore, forth, &c. : 
TToikos, pullus d^iidi foal, filly : nv^, pugnus 2iidi fist : iraTr^p, paier 
2indi father : irevre Siud five, Geimsin fmf: 7rovs,pes 2ind foot : 
pecus diXidfeoh : pasco 2ind feed : piscis and fish, - 

If the classical word begins with an aspirate, the English 
word begins with a middle : for example, the Greek $ or 
Latin f is found responsive to the English b. Thus, (fyvy^s, 
fagus and beech : cf)va>,fm' and de : <ppaTpia,f rater and brother : 
cfiepco,fero and bear. The Greek by the same rule responds 
to the English d; as in dvyarrjp and daughter. Where the 
Classical word has a middle, the English should have a thin. 
Thus the Greek' B and Latin b should answer to our English 
p. In proof of this we may perhaps cite ^vQo^ 2indpit, pro- 
perly pyt : but here we must pass into another group of 
consonants to find suitable illustrations, as our early language 
was remarkably poor in words beginning with p. Leav- 
ing then the labials or lip-consonants which have afforded 
us all the instances so far quoted, let us try the tooth- 
consonants or dentals. If the Greek or Latin has the 
medial, the English should have the thin : that is to say, 
a Classic A or d should correspond to our EngHsh t. 
And so it does in buKpv and tear : dvo, duo and tzvo : deKu, 
decern and ten : depo), donius and timbran, the Saxon verb 
for building : bevdpov, bpvs and tree : dingua, archaic Latin 
for lingua, and tongue. These, and all such illustrations, 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 5 

may be summarised for convenience sake in the following 
mnemonic formula : — 

T A M 

% m % 

where the Roman letters of the Latin word tajn placed over 
the Gothic letters of the German word -tot are intended to 
bracket together the initial letters of Thins, Medials, and 
Aspirates, so as to represent the order of transition. . 

These examples will suffice if they satisfy the reader that 
here we have traces of a regular law. We only desire to 
establish the fact that our language is of one and the same 
strain with the Greek arid Latin, that is to say, it is one of 
the Indo-European family. ^ 

It will be easy to discover a great number of examples 
w^hich lie outside the above analogy. But this will not 
injure the proof resulting from those examples, unless it 
can be supposed that those are mere accidental resem- 
blances arbitrarily collected. Against such an idea is to be 
placed the consideration that they are chiefly taken from 
M^ords of the first necessity. These have a tendency to 
be very permanent in languages, so that the similarities 
which they now bear, they have most probably borne for 
an extended length of time. And if so, it is reasonable to 
suppose that such analogies have once been more numerous 
than they now are. Casualties happen to words as to all 
mortal products : and in the course of time their forms get 
defaced. The German language offers many examples of 
this. If I want to understand the consonantal analogies 
which existed between English and German, I should prefer 
as a general rule to go to the oldest form of German, because 
• a conventional orthography, among other causes, has in 
German led to a disfigurement of many of the forms. The 



6 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

tendency of words to get"[disguised, is, therefore, one reason 
why these analogies do not hold more completely than they 
do. Another reason is, that in progress of time new prin- 
ciples of word-forming are slowly admitted, new words and 
new forms overlay and supersede the old ; and therefore we 
must not complain if any one set of rules does not account 
for all the phenomena of the comparison. 

But if such a relation as that which is condensed in the 
above mnemonic is clearly established as existing between 
the Classical languages on the one hand, and the Gothic on 
the other; much more distinctly and largely may it be 
shewn that a like relation exists internally between the two 
main subdivisions of the Gothic family. These two parts 
are the High Dutch and the Low Dutch. The Modern or 
New High Dutch is what we now call '■ German,' the great 
literary language of Central Europe, inaugurated by Luther 
in his translation of the Bible. Behind this great modern 
speech M^e have two receding stages of its earlier forms, the 
Middle High Dutch or the language of the Epic of the 
Nibelungen, and the Old High Dutch or the language of 
the Scripture paraphrasts Otfrid and Notker. The Alt- 
Hoch-Deutsch goes back to the tenth century ; the Mittel- 
Hoch-Deutsch goes back to the thirteenth; and the Neu- 
Hoch-Deutsch dates from the Reformation of the sixteenth 
century. This is the High Dutch division of the Gothic 
languages. 

Round about these in a broken curve are found the 
representatives of the Low Dutch family. Their earliest 
literary traces go back to the fourth century', and appear 
in the villages of Dacia, in lands which slope to the Danube ; 
where the country is now called Wallachia. It is from this 
region that we have the Moeso-Gothic Gospels and other 
relics of the planting of Christianity. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 7 

But their greatest body is to the north and west. Along 
the German shores of the Baltic, and far inland, where High 
Dutch is established in the educated ranks, the mass of the 
folk speak Low Dutch, which locally passes by the name of 
Platt-Deutsch. The kingdom of the Netherlands, where it 
is a truly national speech, the speech of all ranks of the com- 
munity—the kingdom of Belgium, where, under the name 
of Flemish, it is striving for recognition, and has gained a 
place in literature through the pen of Hendrik Conscience — 
the old district of the Hanseatic cities, the Lower Elbe, 
Hamburgh, Liibeck, Bremen, — all this is Nieder-Deutsch, 
Low Dutch. 

To this family belongs the English language in respect 
of that which is the oldest and most material part of it. 
It has received so many additions from other sources, and 
has worked them up with so much individuality of effect, 
as to have in fact produced a new language, and a language 
which, from external circumstances, seems likely to become 
the parent of a new strain of languages. But all the out- 
growth and exuberance of English clusters round a Low 
Dutch centre. 

It would be a departure from the general way of philo- 
logers to include under the term of Low Dutch the languages 
of Scandinavia. The latter have very strong individualising 
features of their own, such as the post-positive article, and 
a form for the passive verb. The post-positive article is 
highly curious. In Modern Danish or Swedish the inde- 
finite article a or an is represented by e7z for masculine and 
feminine, and e^ for neuter. Thus en skov signifies a wood 
(shaw) and et trcB signifies a tree. But if you want to say 
the ivood, the tree, you suffix the selfsame articles to the nouns, 
and then they have the effect of the definite article : skoven, 
the wood ; trceet, the tree. 



8 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

The possession of 2^ form for the passive is hardly less 
remarkable, when we consider that of all the Gothic family 
of languages it is the Scandinavian group alone that has 
made any approach to it. The Gothic languages in general 
make the passive, as we do in English, by the aid of the^ 
verb to he. Active to love, passive to he loved, &c. But the 
Scandinavian dialects just add an s to the active, and that 
makes it passive. This j is a relic of an old reflective pro- 
noun, so that it is most like the French habit of getting a sort 
of a passive by prefixing the reflective pronoun se. Thus 
in French marier is to marry (active), of parents who marry 
their children ; but if you have to express to marry in the 
sense of to get married or to he married, you say se marier > 
Examples of the Danish passive form : — 

Active. Passive, 

At give, to give At gives, to he given 

At elske, to love At elskes, to he loved 

At finde, to find At findes, to he found 

At faae, to get At faaes, to he gotten 

At drive, to drive At drives, to he driven 

So Strongly marked a characteristic might seem to forbid 
the classifying of these languages with the Low Dutch. But 
on the other hand there are between the two best preserved 
forms of each group — that is, between the Icelandic of the 
north and the Gothic of the south — such deep traces of 
affinity, that they must be embraced, as against the High 
Dutch dialects, in one category. And it is a circumstance 
worthy of observation, that these languages have no ancient 
and domestic name by which they are characterized, except 
that of the Northern (Norrsena) Speech. This seems like 
an internal testimony that they are the northern branch of 
the Low Dutch family. 

A large proportion of the consonantal variations between 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 





• S 


O 


c^ 


SI 


J-H 






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a H 


(D 
> 




















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be 


o 




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(tJ 


J 


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O 


To 


a 




o 






^ 


<u 


^ 


a^ 


.22 




■^ 
^ g 


'bb 


1 


^ 

2 

^ 


o 
■5 






s ^ 


fi 


^ 




<+-< 


rt 






g3 


^3 




o 


17:3 






<U 


^ 






^ 




CS 1^ 


K£l 






<v 


'c« 






^ 


be 




V. 






^3 


a 

o 


G 
1 


^ 


'm 


OS 





^ 










"3 


a; 












rSH 


t^ 


'a 

% 


"5 






^ 


bo 


2 




'p. 


1 


bo 




'0. 




.22 


.g 


a 




c^ 


c2 








O 


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13 


c^ 


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,£11 


bo 


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s 


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bo 


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a 


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a 


rt 
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OJ 


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a3 

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Hi 


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i 


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a; 


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HH.SHHHHE^HHHtHHEH 



3 rt^^rt Sd-S-i^c^s 

OS :73 .!3 .- .5 .2 ^ 3 5 > t^ rt cs S 



(U .2: .Si .S :^ .- (U =f " ^ :o3 S D 'C 

NNNNNNNNNNNNNN 



SKETCH OF THE RISE^ 



Compare also the following German and English words, 

as an illustration of j r in other parts than the initials of 

words : — weiss, wMe : wasser, wa/er : heiss, ko^ : essen, 

ea^ ; and as an example of ^ > mut, 7?wod. 

To the same effect is the following list, in which the Old 
High Dutch is compared with the English and others of the 
same division : 



O.H.D. 


English, &c. 


Zuo 


To 


Zagal 


Tail 


Zahar 


Tear 


Zala 


Tale 


Zeljan 


Tell 


Zand 


Tooth 


Zehan 


Ten 


Zeichan 


Token 


Zelt 


Tent 


Zam 


Tame 


Zerjan 


Tear 


Ziagal 


Tile 



O.H.D. 


English, &c. 


Zies-tag 

Ziht 

Zil 


Tuesday 
Tiht (A.S.) 
Till 


Zimbar 


Timber 


Zit 


Tide 


Ziuhan 
Zugil 


Teon (A.S.) 
Tackle 


Zol 


Toll 


Zomi 
Zorn 


rTom(Dan.&Swed 
t Tomr (Isl.) 
? Torn (A.S.) 
\ Toorn (Dutch) 



In like manner the Old High Dutch Zofa, = tuft, corre- 
sponds to our Tof in local names, as Tothill, or Tuthill. 

The Old High German zouvi is in Dutch tooni : in 
Swedish toem : in Danish toemme : in Icelandic ^aum : in 
Anglo-Saxon /yme : and in English fea??i. 

These examples are all drawn from one set of consonants, 
the tooth-consonants or dentals, and it is in this class of con- 
sonants that the most conspicuous examples occur. The 
throat-consonants or gutturals would provide but a com- 
paratively feeble set of examples. And as to the lip-con- 
sonants or labials, they are for the most part alike in the 
High and Low Dutch divisions. The Old High Dutch 
words hachan, had, bach, bald, bancli, hart, bein, bo ran, bar a, 



. OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. II 

biian, botah, Sec, correspond to the English bake, bath, beck, 
bold, bench, beard, bone, born, bier, bide, body, &c. Yet a 
marked tendency in Old High Dutch to spell many words 
with p instead of b, goes to sustain our law, which requires 
the High Dutch to have a thin consonant where Low Dutch 
has a middle. These illustrations of the reciprocity of con- 
sonants are not co-extensive with the whole scheme as de- 
vised by Grimm, but they contain the more obvious and con- 
spicuous parts of it. What has been said will shew the 
nature of the thing ; and a little reflection will make it clear 
how strong an evidence of primaeval relationship these analo- 
gies carry with them. 

This evidence would be far less perfect than it is, but 
for the material which has been supplied by means of 
Christianity. To this cause we trace the preservation of 
the oldest Hterary records of our family of languages. In 
the fourth century Scripture was translated into Moeso- 
Gothic, at a stage in the condition of the Moeso-Goths 
when by their own natural literary efforts they could barely 
have recorded a name on a tomb-stone. In the seventh 
century Anglo-Saxon was cultivated by means of Chris- 
tianity, and over five centuries were produced those writings 
which have partly survived. In the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries the spread of Christianity northwards had the 
effect of getting the Norsk Sagas to be committed to 
writing. Literary culture has been transplanted from the old 
into the midst of the young and rising peoples of the world, 
and hence it has come to pass that among the nations which 
have sprung into existence since Christianity, a better record 
of their primitive language has been preserved. Hence 
the striking fact that we can trace the written history of 
our English language within this island for the space of 
twelve hundred years. Christianity was the cause of its 



12 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

early cultivation; and this has made it possible for us to 
follow back the traces of our language into a far higher 
relative antiquity than that in which the languages of Greece 
and Rome first begin to emerge into historic view. 

This has been very generally the case with the Christian 
nations of the world. Their literature begins with their 
conversion; and but for that event it would have been long 
delayed. 

Thus the rude tribes of the distant islands have now, by 
means of the missionaries, the best books of the world 
translated into their own tongues; and this at a stage 
of existence in which they could not produce a written 
record. Thus it was that in the fourth century the Goths 
on the Danube were converted to Christianity ; and we have 
much of the New Testament still remaining to us, which 
was then rendered into the Gothic dialect. This is the 
oldest book we can go back to, as written in a language 
like our own. It has therefore a national interest for us; 
but apart from this, it has a nobility and grandeur all its 
own, as it is one of the finest specimens of ancient lan- 
guage. It is by this, and this alone, that we are able to 
realise to how high a pitch of inflection the speech of our 
own race was carried. Inflections which in German, or 
even in Anglo-Saxon, are but fragmentarily preserved, like 
rehcs of an expiring fashion, are there seen standing forth 
in all their archaic rigidity and polysyllabicity. 

Matth. vii. I. 
Mt) Kpivere IVa jxt) KpiOTJTC. 

Ni stojith ei ni stojaindau. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 1 3 

Matth. ix. 31. 

Ith. eis us-gaggandans us-meridedun ina in allai 

Bui ihey out-going out-heralded him in all 

airthai jainai. 
earth that (yon). 

Matth. x. 36. 

Jah fijands mans innaktindai is. 

-£V inimici hominis domestici ejus. 

The grammatical system of the Gothic dialect has been 
compared for its effect to that of the Sanscrit. But while 
these two languages may be mentioned together as the two 
signal examples of high inflectional tension, it should not 
be forgotten that an immense gulf of circumstance divides 
them. The Sanscrit grammar is the product of a long- 
sustained and cloistered culture — the Gothic grammar was 
the property of shepherds, who were little in advance of 
the life of nomads. Not until the field of language has 
been much more generally cultivated, will it be known and 
appreciated how great a light of history is preserved to us 
in the Gothic remains. For these we have to thank the 
benign and fertilising effect of Christianity, which sheds 
hght directly and indirectly, and in whose nature it is to 
promote all things that enrich the life of man, and to animate 
with worthy objects every one of his faculties. Professor 
Max Miiller has declared how greatly philology is indebted 
to Christianity; and he has testified that, but for its influence, 
this science could hardly, as yet, have come into existence. 

In the subjoined Lord's Prayer the EngHsh is a little 
distorted in order to act as a guide to the Gothic words: — 



14 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

From the Gothic Version of Ulphilas ; made about a.d. 365. 

Aivaggeljo tliairh Matthaiu. 
From Chap. vi. of the Gospel by Matthew. 

Atta unsar thu in himinam 

Father our thou in heaven 

Veilmai namo thein 
Be-halloived name thine 

Kvimai tliiudmassus theins 

Come kingdom thine 

Vairtliai vilja theins, sve in himina jali ana airthai 

Be-done will thine as in heaven yea on earth 

Hlaif unsarana thana sinteinan gif \xns himma daga 
Loaf our the daily give us this day. 

lah aflet uns tliatei skxilans sijaima 

Vea off-let us that-which owing we-be 

Svasve jah veis afletam thaim skulam unsar aim 
So-as yea we off-let those debtors of ours 

lah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai 

Vea not bring us in temptation 

Ak lausei uns af tliamma ubilin 
But loose us of the evil 

ITnte theina ist tliiudangardi 
For thine is kingdom 

lah mahts lah vulthus 
Vea might Yea glory 

In aivins. Am fen. 
In eternity. Amen. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 1 5 

The Low Dutch family of languages falls into two natural 
divisions, the Southern or Teutonic Platt-Deutsch, and the 
Northern or Scandinavian. It was at the point of junction 
between these halves — at the neck of the Danish penin- 
sula, along the banks of the Elbe, and along the south-west 
coasts of the Baltic — that our continental progenitors lived 
and spoke. A question has been raised, whether we are to 
be classed with the northern or the southern division of this 
great family. 

An incident that occurred at Clair- sur-Epte in the year 
A.D. 912, tends to shew that Englisc then was very like 
Danish. Rolf the Northern chief would not kiss the foot of 
Charles the Simple, unless he lifted it to his mouth. Accord- 
ing to one form of the tale, the famous refusal was made in 
a language which was taken for Englisc. Now the company 
present spoke Frankish, that is to say, Old High Dutch ; and 
unless we suppose Rolf to have learnt EngHsc, which seems 
a romantic hypothesis, we have the interesting testimony 
that the Franks saw little or no distinction between Englisc 
and Danish ^. 

A great deal may be said, and in fact has been said and 
written, to prove that we are Scandinavians, and to draw us 
over the middle border. But it generally resolves itself into 
a number of points of similarity rather than into an essential 
and ancient similitude. Words and names are compared as 
if it were forgotten how largely wx have borrowed from the 
Danes in historic times. It is not to be denied, however, 
that we have some peculiarities in common with the Norsk 
dialects, which argue very close relations with those people. 
A striking illustration of this may be found in the Anglo- 
Saxon word for the giant of the legends. The giant is eoten, 
the same word as the Old l^orsk Jo^unn — a word unknown 

^ Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 190. 



1 6 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

in the Teutonic branch. Grimm imagined that the word had 
been derived from the verb to eaf (efan), because the giant 
is a huge eater. But this can hardly be. Aheady in the 
Beowulf ^Q have the adjective formed from eoten, eotenisc, of 
a sword that had belonged to giants. Professor Nilsson, in 
his Stone Age (p. 228, ed. Lubbock), has, with great appear- 
ance of probabihty, traced this word to a Lapland origin, so 
that the word would have flowed out along with the Giant- 
Sagas, which he makes the Laps the parents of. That a .word 
of mark like this should have its barrier between us and 
Germany— should be in Norsk and Saxon, but not in any 
High or Low Dutch — is an indication that our ancestors 
can hardly be classed as pure and unaltered Teutons. The 
Saxons were a border people, and spoke a Low Dutch 
strongly impregnated with Scandinavian associations. But 
the more we go back into the elder forms on either side, the 
more does it seem to come out clear, that our mother 
tongue is, in fundamentals, to be identified with the Platt- 
Deuisch, the dialect of the Hanseatic cities, the dialect which 
has been created into a national language in that which we 
call the Dutch, as spoken in the kingdom of the Netherlands. 
The people of Bremen call their dialect Nieder-Sdchisch, i.e. 
Lowland-Saxon; and the genuine original ' Saxony' of 
European history was in this part, namely, the middle and 
lower Met of the Elbe. The name of ' Saxon ' has always 
adhered to our nation, though we have seemed almost as 
if we had been willing to divest ourselves of it. We have 
called our country England, and our language English : yet 
our neighbours west and north, the Welsh and the Gael, have 
still called us Saxons, and our language Saxonish. It has 
become the literary habit of recent times to use the term 
* Saxon ' as a distinction for the early period of our history 
and language and hterature, and to reserve the term 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 1 7 

'English' for the later period. There is some degree of 
literary impropriety in this, because the Saxons called their 
own language Englisc. On this ground some critics insist 
that we should let the word English stand for the whole 
extent of our insular history, which they would divide into 
Old English, Middle Enghsh, and New English. But on 
the whole, the terms already in use seem bolder, and more 
distinct. They enable us to distinguish between Saxon and 
Anglian; and they also comprise the united nation under 
the compound term Anglo-Saxon. As expressive of the 
dominant power, it is not very irregular to call the whole 
nation briefly Saxon. 

We have no contemporary account of the Saxon colonisa- 
tion. The story which Baeda gives us in the eighth century, 
is, that there were people from three tribes. Angles, Saxons, 
and Jutes. The latter were said to be still distinguishable in 
Kent and the Isle of Wight ; but, except in this statement, 
we have lost all trace of the Jutes. The Angles and Saxons 
long stood apart and distinct from one another; and they 
had each a corner of their own. The Anglians occupied 
the north and east of England, and the Saxons the south 
and west. The line of Watling Street, running from London 
to Chester, may be taken as the boundary line between these 
races, whom we shall sometimes combine, according to 
prevalent usage, under the joint name of Anglo-Saxons, or 
under the dominant name of Saxons. 

When the Anglo-Saxons began to make themselves masters 
of this island, they found here a population which is known in 
-history as the British race. This people spoke the language 
which is now represented by the Welsh. It was an ancient 
Keltic dialect somewhat tinctured with Latin. The Britons 
had been in subjection to Roman dominion for a space of 
between three and four centuries. This would naturally have 
c 



15 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

left a trace upon their language. And hence we find that 
of the words which the Saxons learnt from the Britons, some 
are undoubted Latin, others are doubtful whether they should 
be called Latin or Keltic. Of the first class are those ele- 
ments of local nomenclature -chestee, from castrum = a 
fortified place — Saxon form, c easier : street, from strata, \.q. 
'via strata' = a causeway — Saxon form, street : port, a word 
derived from the Latin porta, a gate, signified in Saxon times 
just 'a town, a market-town.' And this is the sense of it in 
such a compound as Newport Pagnell. Wall (Saxon weall) 
is through the same filtered process a descendant of the 
Latin Valium = a rampart : mil, from the Latin ?jiilia (pas- 
suum), a thousand paces, has lived through all the ages to 
our day, and we are the only people of Western Europe who 
still make use of this Roman measure of distance. The 
French keep to their league {lieue), the measure which they 
had in use before the Romans troubled them, the old Keltic 
leuga. In Saxon poetry we find the old highways called by 
the suggestive name of mil-pa^as, the mile-paths. Corvee, 
a troop, is probably the Latin cohors : carceen, a prison, is 
the Latin career, with the Saxon word em, a building, 
mingled into the last syllable : tigol, a tile, is the Roman 
iegula : meowle, a poetic word for woman, is most likely 
the Latin mulier ; and f^mne, a prose word for the same, is 
from the 'L'aXm/cBmina. ' Orchard,' in Saxon ort-geaed, is 
a tautological compound of the Latin hortus or ortus, a 
garden, and geard, the Saxon for garden or any yard or 
enclosure. At this time too, we must have received the 
names of many plants and fruits, as pyeige, the pear, Latin 
pyrus. 

Many of the words which pertain to the personal and 
social comforts of life, were in this manner learnt at second- 
hand from Roman culture : as disc, a dish, from his handing 



J 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 1 9 

of which a royal officer all through the Saxon period bore 
the title of disc-Jjegn, dish-thane. 

From those which we class as certainly Brito-Roman, we 
move on to some other words which hover between the 
characteristics of British and Roman. Such is that famous 
verb to ear, in the sense of 'to plough, till, cultivate'; which 
in the form ekiajn" was the standard word for ploughing all 
through the Saxon period, a word which occurs in Shak- 
speare, and which in the opening of the seventeenth century 
was still in force sufficient to retain five places in our version 
of the Old Testament, as may be seen by reference to 
Cruden's Concordance, under the words Ear, Eared, Earing. 
This word might be derived from the Latin arare, through 
the British form aru; or the British form may be considered 
as an independent Keltic word, with as good a claim to 
originality as the Latin. And to this latter view its wealth 
of derivatives seems to point. This, however, is a question 
which belongs rather to a history of the British language, 
than to English philology. What concerns us here to note, 
is this : that soon after the Saxon settlement, the verb eeian 
must have been adopted from the British vernacular. 

When we consider that there was much originally in com- 
mon between the Latin and the Keltic, and, even again, 
between these two and the Gothic languages, it is no matter 
of surprise that after so long a period we should find it 
difficult to sift out with absolute distinctness the words which 
we owe to the British influence. The most certain are 
those names of rivers and mountains, and some elements in 
the names of ancient towns, which have been handed on 
from Keltic times to ours. Thus the river-name Avon is 
unquestionably British, for it is the common word for river 
in Wales to this day. So again with regard to that large 
class of river-names which are merely variations of the one 
c 2 



20 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

name Isca — Usk, Ux, Wis- in Wisbech, The Wash, Exe, Axe, 
Ouse, by academic corruption Isis, and by municipal cor- 
ruption Ox- in Oxford. All these are but many forms of 
one Keltic word, m'sg = water ; which is found in usquehagh, 
the Irish for eau-de-vie, and in the word whiskey. There are, 
however, on our map, a great many names of rivers and 
cities and mountains, of which, though so precise an account 
cannot be rendered, it is generally concluded that they are 
British— because they run back historically into the time 
when British was prevalent — because they are not Saxon — 
because, in short, they cannot otherwise be accounted for. 
Such are, Thames, Tamar, Frome, Derwent, Trent, Tweed, 
Severn, and the bulk of our great river-names. In like 
manner of the oldest town-names, and some names of 
districts. 

The first syllable in PFz>2chester is known to us, through 
the Latin form of Venta, to have been the same as the 
Welsh Gwent, a plain or open country. The first syllable 
in Manchtster is probably the old Keltic man, place ; just 
as it probably is in the archaic name for Bath, Nke-man- 
chester. Fo7'k is so called from the Keltic river-name Eure ; 
from an elder form of which came the old Latin form of the 
city-name Ebur-acum. But often where the sense cannot 
be so plainly traced, we acquiesce in the opinion that names 
are British, because their place in history seems to require 
it. Such are, for instance, Keni, London, Gloucester. 

We will add a few words that have a fair Keltic reputation, 
basket, bran, breeches, clout, crag, crock, manor, paddock, wicket. 

It is very probable that a few Keltic words are still living 
on among us in the popular names of wild plants. The 
cockle of our corn-fields, which the botanists call Agrostemma 
Githago, has been with great reason attributed to the Britons. 
•Dr. Johnston, in The Botany of the Eastern Borders (Van 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 21 

Voorst, 1853), explains this word by reference to the British 
word cock = red. This etymology is strengthened by the 
fact that he had heard in the neighbourhood of Gordon the 
red corn-poppy called cockeno. Not only is this word cockle 
used in Chaucer, but also in the Saxon Gospels, in Matt. xiii. 
in those places where our version has tares. The Saxon 
form is coccel. The word is not found in the kindred 
dialects. This is the more important to observe, because 
the bulk of popular tree and plant names are common to us 
with the German, Dutch, Danish, &c. The words tree, beam, 
holt, wood, oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, aspen, li??ie, yew, ah^er, 
thorn, bramble, reed, wheat, rye, bere, bean, weed, flax, wort, 
grass, root, leek, thistle, clover, radish, wormwood, yarrow, 
waybread, moss, nightshade, bloom, blossom, corn, apple, — are 
more or less common to the cognate languages. This is 
not the case with the coccel. Other plant-names may be 
added which are probably British, as willow. This may 
well be traced to the Welsh helig as its nearer relative, 
without interfering with the more distant claims of saugh, sal- 
lotv, salix. Whin, also, 2.n^ furze have perhaps a right here. 
And eglantine, which has become the standard poetic name 
for the dog-rose, and which has such a French air, due 
to its having been adopted from the poetry of the Fabliaux, 
is very probably a British w^ord. With strong probability 
also may we add to this botanical list the terms husk, haw; 
and more particularly cod, a word that merits a special 
remark. What it came to mean in the Elizabethan dramatists 
must here be kept apart. In Anglo-Saxon times it meant 
a bag, a purse or wallet. See a spirited passage in the 
Saxon Chronicle of Peterborough, a. d. 1131, and my 
note there. Thence it was applied to the seed-bags of 
plants, as pease-cod. This seems to be the Welsh cwd. The 
puif-ball is in Welsh cwd-y-mwg, a bag of smoke. Owen 



12, SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Pughe quotes this Welsh adage : — ' Egor dy gwd pan gaech 
borcheir : i.e. open thy dag when canst get a pig! — an 
expression which for picturesqueness must be allowed the 
palm over our English proverb ' Never say no to a good 
offer.' What establishes the British origin of this word is 
the large connection it has in Welsh, and its appearance 
also in Brittany. Thus in Welsh there is the diminutive 
form cydyn, a little pouch, and the verb cuddw, to hide, with 
many allied words ; in Breton there is kod, pocket. 

The compound cock-hoat is probably a tautological com- 
pound, of which the first part is the Welsh cwch, a boat. 
The word has several derivatives in Welsh. 

The word clock, which signifies bell in German (Glocke) 
and in French {cloche), is undoubtedly British. A bell in 
Welsh is clock, in Gaelic clag, and in Manx clag. But then 
this word did not come into our language (probably) till the 
twelfth century. Yet it may have had an obscure existence 
among us in Saxon times. 

Bard is unquestionably British, and so is glen. But then 
these made their entry later, and we must not dwell on them 
here, and wander from our subject, which is the immediate 
influence of the British on the Saxon. 

The Saxons called a sorcerer dry, and sorcery or magic 
they called dry-cr^ft. These words are not found in any 
of the dialects cognate to ours, and therefore they must 
have learnt the word of the Britons. Here then we seem 
to have evidence of the influence of the Druids, as still 
surviving within the Saxon period. Out of this word dry, 
a verb was made, be-drian, to bewitch or fascinate. Thus 
we read in the homily on Swi^un : — 

Sume swefna syndon soHice of Some dreams are verily of God ; 

Gode. and sume beoS of deofle and some be of the devil for some 

to sumum swicdome. J?a swefna delusion. Those dreams be cheerful 

beoS v^ynsume ]?e gewur]?a3 of that are of God ; and those are hor- 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 23 

Gode. anil J^a beo^ egesfulle \>e of rible that come from the devil. And 

)3am deofle cumaS. and God sylf God himself forbade that we should 

forbead ])set we swefnum ne folgion. follow dreams, lest the devil should 

Jjy laes f)e se deofol us be-drian mage. have power to bewitch us. 

The participle of this verb, be-drida, a disordered man, 
has, by a false light of cross analogy, generated the modern 
bed-ridden, a half-sister of hag-j'idden. 

We can never expect to know with anything like precision 
what were the relations of the British and Saxon languages 
to each other and to the Latin language, until each has 
been studied comparatively to a degree of exactness beyond 
anything which has yet been attempted. All the Gothic 
dialects must be taken into comparison on the one hand, 
and all the Keltic dialects on the other. But the branch 
from which most light is to be expected is the Breton, as 
spoken in French Brittany. The great and fundamental 
question is : — How far the British population at large was 
Romanised? Some think that habits of speaking Latin 
were almost universal, and for this they refer to the rude 
inscribed stones of the early centuries which are found in 
Wales, and which are in a Latin base enough to be attri- 
buted to the most illiterate stonemasons. On this view, 
which receives support also from the number of Latin 
words in Welsh, the arrival of the Saxons prevented this 
island from being the home of a Romanesque people like 
the French or Spanish. 

The British language as now spoken in Wales, is called, 
by those who speak it, Cyinraeg. But the Anglo-Saxons 
called it Wylsc, and the people who spoke it they called 
Walas : which we have modernised into Wales and Welsh. 
So the Germans of the continent called the Italians and 
their language Welsch. The word simply Vi\e2in?> foreign 
or strange. At various points on the frontiers of our race, 
we find them affixing this name on the conterminous 



24 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Romance -Speaking people. This is the most probable 
account of the names of Wallach'a, the Walloons in Belgium, 
and the Canton Walk's in Switzerland, though the latter is 
often explained by the Latin valh's, a valley. The French, 
who were such unwelcome visitors and settlers in this 
country in the reign of Edward the Confessor, are called by 
the contemporary annalist ]>a welisce men, by which was meant 
' the foreigners.' And when Edward himself came from the 
life of an exile in France, he was said by the chronicler to 
have come 'hider to lande of weallande,' to this country 
from foreign land. It is the same word which forms the 
last syllable in Cormvall, for the Kelts who dwelt there were 
by the Saxons named the Walas of Kerny w. 

The feminine form of zveal or wealh, a foreigner, was 
wylen ; and it is an illustration of the servile condition 
to which the old inhabitants were reduced, that the words 
wealh and wylen were used to signify male and -female 
slaves. 

About the year a.d. 600, Christianity began to be received 
by the Saxons. The Jutish kingdom of Kent was the first 
that received the Gospel, but the Anglian kingdom of 
Northumbria exhibited the first mature example of a 
Christian nation in Saxondom. Intimately connected with 
this, if not absolutely rising out of it, is the supremacy of 
position and influence which the northern kingdom enjoyed 
in this island for a hundred and thirty years. It is evident 
that there was great and substantial progress in religion, 
civilisation, and learning; of which fact the permanent 
memorial is the name and works of Bseda, who expired 
not long before the greatness of his people. While Can- 
terbury was the nominal metropolis of Christianity, the 
kingdom of Northumbria was its powerful seat. It was the 
securing of this national Church in the Roman interest 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 1^ 

that effectually put a stop to the progress of the Scotian 
discipline in this island. It was (probably) the power which 
this nation wielded, and the admiration she excited in her 
neighbours, that caused them to emulate her example, to 
read her books, to form their language after hers, and 
to call it ENGLisc. They first produced a cultivated book- 
speech, and they had the natural reward of inventors and 
pioneers, that of setting a name to their product. Of all the 
losses which are deplored by the investigator of the English 
language, perhaps there is none - greater than this, that the 
whole Anglian vernacular literature should have perished in 
the ravages of the Danes upon the Northumbrian mona- 
steries. Of the existence of such a native Hterature there is 
no room for doubt. Baeda tells us of such ; and he himself 
was occupied on a translation when he died. Thus the 
obscure name of Angle emerged into celebrity, and being 
accepted first for the generic name of the Saxon language, 
passed next to the land, and afterwards to the inhabitants of 
the land. And now, as in the early time, though it does not 
designate the British Empire, yet it does designate the lan- 
guage which is the common vehicle of thought throughout 
that Empire. 

The extant works of Baeda are all in Latin, but 
they afford occasional glimpses of information about the 
spoken Englisc of his day. As for example, in the Epistola 
ad Ecgbei-htum, he advises that prelate to make all his flock 
learn by heart the Creed and the Lord's Prayer. In Latin, 
if they understand it, by all means, says he, — but in their 
own tongue if they do not know Latin. Which, he adds, 
is not only the case with laity, but with clerks likewise and 
monks. And markedly insisting on his theme, as if even 
then the battle of the vernacular had to be fought, he goes 
on to give his reasons why he had often given copies of 



26 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

translations to folk that were no scholars, and many of them 
priests too. ' Propter quod et ipse multis saepe sacerdotibus 
idiotis haec utraque, et symbolum videlicet et Dominicam 
orationem in linguam Anglorum translatam obtuli.' These 
are the -words of Bseda. 

One of his most interesting chapters is that in which he 
gives the traditional story of the vernacular poet Csedmon, 
who by divine inspiration was gifted with the power of song, 
for the express purpose of rendering the Scripture narratives 
into popular verse. The extant poems of the Creation and 
Fall and Redemption, which are preserved in archaic Saxon 
verse, are attributed to this Csedmon ; and it is possible that 
they may be his work, having undergone in the process 
of copying what may be called a partiaL translation. We 
gather from the account in Bseda, that the practice of 
making ballads was in a high state of activity, and also 
that vernacular poetry was used as a vehicle of popular 
instruction in the seventh century in Northumbria. And 
it is interesting to reflect that in all our island there is 
no district which to this day has an equal reputation for 
lyric poetry, whether we think of the mediaeval ballads, or 
of Burns, or of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. 

It was in the monastery of Whitby, under the famous govern- 
ment of the abbess Hilda, that the first sacred poet of our 
race devoted his life to the vocation to which he had been 
mysteriously called. And if something of the legendary 
hangs over his personal history, this only shows how 
strongly his poetry had stirred the imagination of his people. 
A nation that could believe their poet to be divinely called, 
was the nation to produce poets, and to elevate the genius 
of their language. Such was the Anglian kingdom of 
Northumbria, and here it was that our language first received 
high cultivation. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 2 J 

It is remarkable that, while the peoples of the southern 
and western and south-eastern parts of the kingdom con- 
tinually called themselves Saxons (whence such local names 
as Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Middlesex), yet they never appear 
in any of their extant literature to call their language Seaxisc, 
but always englisc^. The explanation of this must be sought, 
as I have already indicated, in that early and prolonged 
leadership which was enjoyed by the kingdom of North- 
humbria in the seventh and eighth centuries. The office of 
BKETWALDA, a kind of elective chieftainship of all Britain, 
was held by several Northumbrian kings in succession. How 
high this title must have sounded in the ears of cotempo- 
raries may be imagined from the fact that it is after the same 
model as their name for the Almighty. The latter was 
ALWALDA, the All-wielding. So Bretwalda was the wielder 
of Britain, or the Emperor of all the States in Britain. 

For two centuries the northern part of the island had a 
flourishing Church and a growing civilisation. Scripture 
translations, sacred hymns, and books of devotion were the 
most active instruments of this development. Alongside 
of these were retained the old heroic songs and epics of 
national story ; sometimes in the ancient form, sometimes 
in revised and modernised versions. We may reasonably 
suppose that the Beowulf then received those last touches 
which are still visible to the reader as masking or softening 
the latent heathendom of that poem. They also had their 
domestic annals, written in the Anglian dialect of Norihum- 
bria. All this vernacular Hterature perished under the ravages 
of the Danes in the ninth century : but not until the torch 
of learning had been kindled in some of the southern parts, 
enough to secure its revival at a favourable opportunity. 

^ Yet we find the Latin equivalent of Seaxisc, as in Asset's Life of Alfred, 
where the vernacular is called Saxonica lingua. 



28 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

That opportunity offered itself under the reign of Alfred, 
who cleared his part of the country of the Danish scourge, 
and was the first to renew the arts of peace. With the men- 
tion of Alfred's name, we seem to enter upon a compara- 
tively modern era, and to quit the obscurity of the pre-Danish 
period. Wessex, or the country of the West Saxons, be- 
comes the arena of our narrative henceforth, and we have 
no occasion to notice Anglian literature again, until the 
fifteenth century, when that dialect had shaped itself into 
a new and distinct national language for the kingdom of 
Scotland. The poet in whose works the Scottish language 
first displays its definite form, is Dunbar, a younger contem- 
porary of Chaucer. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth 
centuries there was a thriving national literature in the 
Anglian dialect, and the best known specimens of it to us 
on the south of the Tweed are the works of Robert Burns, 
and the dialogues in 'brad Scots,' which so charmingly di- 
versify the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It is odd that this 
language, which is in fact the genuine Anglian, should have 
received the Keltic name of ' Scotch ' from the Gaelic 
dynasty which mounted the Anglian throne, and that in 
taking its modern name from its northern neighbours it 
should have furnished a parallel to the adoption of the name 
' English ' by the West Saxons. 

Wessex had not been entirely destitute of men of learning 
during the period in which the focus of civilisation was in 
Northumbria. Aldhelm is the first name of eminence in 
southern literature. He died in a.d. 709. He translated 
the Psalms of David into his native tongue, and it has been 
supposed that his work may in some measure be represented 
by an exuberant Saxon version of the Psalter which is pre- 
served in the Bibliotheque Nationah at Paris, and which was 
printed in the year 1835 at the Clarendon Press, under the 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 29 

editorship of Mr. Thorpe. But though we can point to 
Aldhelm, and one or two other names of cultivated men in 
Wessex, they are exceptions to the general rudeness and 
uncultured state of that kingdom before Alfred's time. It 
was distinguished for its military rather than for its literary 
successes. Learning resided northward. Alfred is reported 
to have said that there was not to be found a priest south 
of the Thames who knew his Ofice in Latin. But with 
him, that is to say, in the last quarter of the ninth century, 
Saxon hterature starts up almost full-grown. It seems as 
if it grew up suddenly, and reached perfection at a bound 
without preparation or antecedents. It has been too much 
the habit to suppose that this phenomenon is sufficiently 
accounted for by the introduction of scholars from other 
countries who helped to translate the most esteemed books 
into Saxon. So the reign of Alfred is apt to get paralleled 
with those rude tribes among whom our missionaries intro- 
duce a translated literature at the same time with the arts 
of reading and writing. It has not been sufficiently con- 
sidered that such translations are dependent on the pre- 
vious exercise of the native tongue, and that foreign help 
can only bring up a wild language to eloquence by very 
slow degrees. There is a vague idea among us that our 
language was then in its infancy, and that its compass was 
as narrow as the few necessary ideas of savage life. A 
modern Italian turning over a Latin book might think it 
looked very barbarous ; and perhaps even some moderate 
scholars have never appreciated to how great a power the 
Latin tongue had attained long before the Augustan era. 
Great languages are not bulk in a day. The fact is that 
Wessex inherited a cultivated language from the north, and 
that when they called their translations Englisc and not 
Seaxisc, they acknowledged that debt. The cultivated 



30 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Anglian dialect became the literary medium of hitherto 
uncultured Wessex ; just as the dialect of the Latian cities 
set the form of the imperial language of Rome, and was 
called Latin ; and the dialect of Castile was the foundation 
of the literary Spanish. 

Of the Saxon language as it was used in Scripture 
versions and Church services, the Lord's Prayer forms the 
readiest illustration. 

THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

From Alfred's Version of the Gospels. 



F-sder ure, ])u Jie eart on heofenum 
Father our, thou thai art in heaven 

Si ])in nama gehalgod 
Be thy name hallowed 

To becume thin rice 
Come thy kingdom 

Geweor}:e ]>'m willa on eorjjan, swa-swa on heofenum 
Be-done thy will on earth, so-as in heaven 

Urne dseghwamlican hlaf syle us to daeg 
Our daily loaf give us to day 

And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa-swa we forgifap urum gyltendum 
And forgive tis our debts, so-as we forgive our debtors 

And ne gelaede ]?u us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfle 
And not lead thou us into temptation, but loose us of evil 

SoJ)lice. 

Soothly (or, Amen). 

The period of Saxon leadership extends from Alfred to 
the Conquest, about a.d. 880 to a.d. 1066. These figures 
represent also the interval at which Saxon Hterature was 
strongest ; but its duration exceeds these limits at either end. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 3 1 

We have poetry, laws, and annals before 880, and we have 
large and important continuations of Saxon Chronicles 
after 1066. Perhaps the most natural date to adopt as 
the term of Saxon literature would be a.d. 1154, the year 
of King Stephen's death, the last year that is chronicled 
in Saxon. 

The Saxon differed from modern English most conspicu- 
ously in being what is called an inflected language. An 
inflected language is one that joins words together, and 
makes them into sentences, not by means of a set of small 
secondary and auxiliary words, but by means of changes 
made in the main words themselves. If we look at a page 
of modern English, we see not only nouns, verbs, adjectives, 
adverbs, conjunctions, these words of primary necessity, but 
a sprinkling of little interpreters among the greater words, 
and that the relations of the great words to one another are 
expressed by the little ones that fill the spaces between them. 
Such are mainly articles, prepositions, and pronouns. In 
more general terms it may be said that the essence of an 
inflected language is, to express by composition of words 
that which an uninflected language expresses by syntax or 
arrangement of words. So that in the inflected language 
more is expressed by single words than in the non- 
inflected. Take as an example those words of the Preacher, 
and see how differently they are expressed in English and 
in Latin : — 

Eccles. iii. 

Tempus nascendi, et tempus mo- A time to he born, and a time to 

riendi ; tempus plantandi, et tempus die ; a time to plant, and a time to 
evellendi quod plantatum est. pluck up that which is planted. 

Tempus occidendi, et tempus sa- A time to kill, and a time to heal ; 

nandi ; tempus destmendi, et tempus a time to break down, and a time to 
sedificandi. build up. 



3^ SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Tempus flendi, et tempus ridendi ; A time to weep, and a time to 

tempus plangendi, et tempus saltandi. laugh ; a time to mourn, and a time 
to dance, 

Tempus spargendi lapides, et tem- A time to cast away stones, and 

pus colligendi. a time to gather stones together. 

There are no words in the Latin answering to these Httle 
words which are itahcised in the Enghsh version — a, the, to, 
of, he — yet the very sense of the passage depends upon them 
in English, often to such a degree that if one of these were 
to be changed, the sense would be completely overturned. 
The Latin has no w^ords corresponding to these little words, 
but it has an equivalent of another kind. The terminations 
of the Latin words undergo changes which are expressive 
of all these modifications of sense ; and these changes of the 
ends of words are called Inflections. 

Languages which make use of these inflections, instead 
of using distinct words for this purpose, are called inflec- 
tional languages. Such were in a high degree the ancient 
Latin and Greek ; and such, in a less degree, was the Anglo- 
Saxon before the Conquest. 

The following piece may serve to illustrate the Saxon 
inflections : — 

Upahafenz/m eagwm on })a heah- With uplifted eyes to the height 

nysse and a])enedz/OT fi.xm.um ongan and with outstretched arms she be- 

gebidda/z mid jjaera welera styrung- gan to pray with stirrings of the lips 

um on stilnesse. in stillness. 

Here we observe in the first place, that terminations in 
the elder speech are replaced by prepositions in the younger. 
* Upahafenz//;^ e2igum ' is ' with uplifted eyes,' and ' ajjenedz/w 
eziraum' is ^with outstretched arms'; and the infinitive 
termination of the verb ' gobiMan ' is in English represented 
by the preposition to. 

But then we observe further in the second place, that 
there are phrases with prepositions as well as inflections. 



ii 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. ^^ 

The phrases ' on J?a heahnysj^/ ' 7?iid . . . styYmgu?n,' ' o?z stil- 
nesjf/ are of this kind — at once prepositional and inflec- 
tional. This indicates a transition-state of the language ; 
a time in which the inflections are no longer what once the}' 
were, self-sufficient. Prepositions are brought to their aid, 
and very soon the whole weight of the function falls on the 
preposition. The inflection then lives on merely as an heir- 
loom in the language, an ancient fashion, ornamental rather 
than necessary. At the first great shake which such a 
language gets, after it is well furnished with prepositions, 
there will most likely be a great shedding of inflections. 
And so it happened to our language after the shock of 
the Conquest, as will be told in its place. 

This then is the chief gramviatical feature of the Saxon 
speech, as seen from our present point of view, and as 
contrasted with the present habits of the English language. 
But it is not in the scheme of its grammar alone that human 
speech is subject to change. Each several part of which 
language is composed has its own liabilities. There is a 
constant movement in human language, though that move- 
ment is neither uniform in all languages, nor is it evenly 
distributed in its action within the limits of any one given 
language. It might almost be imagined as if there were 
a pivot somewhere in the motion, and as if the elemental 
parts were more or less moveable in proportion as they 
lay farther from, or nearer to that pole or pivot of revolution. 
Accordingly, we see words like man, word, thing, can, 
smith, heap, on, an, which seem like permanent fixtures 
through the ages, and at first sight we might think that they 
had sufl'ered no change within the horizon of our observation. 
They are found in our oldest extant writings spelt just as 
we now spell them. 

There are others, on the contrary, which have long been 

D 



34 



SKETCH OF THE RISE 



obsolete and forgotten, for which new words have been long 
ago substituted. Sometimes a whole series of substitutions 
successively superseding each other have occupied the place 
of an old Saxon word. The Saxon iviiodlice was in the 
middle ages represented by verily, and in modern times by 
certainly. The verb gehyrsuviian passed away, and instead 
of it we find the expression to he huxom, and this yielded to 
the modern verb to obey. The Saxon lictun was the 
mediaeval litten, and the modern churchyard. In this class 
of instances the change is conspicuous, and requires little 
comment ; but in the former set it might more easily escape 
observation. 

Even there, however, alteration has taken place. Man 
spells in old Saxon as in modern English, but yet it has 
altered in grammatical habit, in application, and in con- 
vertible use. In grammatical habit it has altered; for in 
Saxon it had a genitive mannes, a dative men, an (archaic) 
accusative mannan, a plural men, a genitive plural manna, 
and a dative plural mannum. Of these it has lost the whole, 
except the formation of the simple plural. In application it 
has altered ; for in Saxon times man was equally applicable 
to womankind as to mankind, whereas now it is limited to 
one sex. In convertible use it has suffered greatly ; for the 
Saxon speech enjoyed the possession of this word as a pro- 
noun, just as the Germans do to this day. In German man 
sagt = man says, which we do not use, and is equivalent to 
our expression of they say or it is said. In German they 
distinguish between the substantive and the pronoun by 
giving the former a double n at the close, in addition to the 
distinction of the initial capital, which in German belongs 
to all substantives : thus, substantive Mann, pronoun man. 
In Saxon (towards the close of the period) the distinction of 
the n is sometimes seen, with a preference of the vowel 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 35 

a for the substantive, and for the pronoun. The follow- 
ing is from a brief summary of Christian duties, written 
probably in the second half of the eleventh century : — 

iErest mon sceal God lufian . . . First, we must love God ... we 

Ne sceal mon mann slean . . . ac must not slay man . . . but every 

aelcne mann mon sceal ^ weor])ian. man we must ever respect : and no 

and ne sceal nan mann don oSrum man should do to another that he 

])aet he nelle J)£et him mon do. would not to himself were done. 

A few more examples of the use of this pronoun are 
added from the Gloucester Fragments of Swi^hun: — 

Hine man bser ])a sona of J)am He was borne then soon from the 

bedde to cyrcan binnan Wihtlande. bed to church in the Isle of Wight. ' 

Swa jjset man ea'Se ne mihte Jjset So that one could not easily visit 

mynster gesecan. the minster. 

pam adligan Jjuhte swilce man his It seemed to the sick man as if 

aenne sceo of ])am fet atuge. somebody were tugging one of his 

shoes off the foot. 

Man sohte })one sceo. They looked for the shoe. 

Our language is at present singularly embarrassed for 
want of this most useful pronoun. At one time we have to 
put a tve, at another time 2. you, at another time a they, at 
other times one or somebody ; and it often happens that none 
of these three will serve, and we must have recourse to the 
passive verb. There are probably few English speakers or 
writers who have not felt the awkwardness resulting from 
our loss of this most regrettable old pronoun. There is 
not one of the great languages which labours under 
a like inability. So far about the word man, which is an 
example of the slowest-moving of words, which has not 
altered in its spelling, and which is yet seen to have under- 
gone alterations of another kind. The other instances shall 
be more lightly touched on. 

Word, has altered grammatically ; for in Saxon it stood 
unvaried in the plural (wokd), but it has now been long 

D 2 



^6 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

assimilated to other nouns, and forms its plural by the 
addition of an s (wokds). 

Thing. This word had much the same vague and ab- 
stract use in Saxon as it has now. *0n mang ]?isum 
]?ingum': among these things. 'Ic seah sellic jjing singan 
on recede' : I saw a strange thing singing on the hall. But 
in Saxon it covered a greater variety of ground than it does 
now. 'Me wear^ Grendles ]?ing undyrne cu^' : the ?na/- 
Ur of Grendel was made known to me. ' Beadohilde ne waes 
hyre bro^ra dea^ on sefan swa sar, swa hyre sylfre j^ing:' 
her brothers' death was not so sore on Beadohild's heart, as 
were her own concerns. 'For his ])ingum': on his account. 

Smith. This word is now applied only to handicraftsmen 
in metals. But in early literature it had its metaphorical 
applications. Not only do we read of the armourer by the 
name of wcBpna smi'6, the weapon-smith; but we have the 
promoter of laughter called ' hleahtor-smi^,' laughter- smith ; 
we have the teacher called ' lar-smi^,' lore-smith ; we have 
the warrior called war-smith, ' wig-smi^.' 

Heap is now only applied to inert matter, but in Saxon to 
a crowd of men : as, ' ])egna heap,' an assembly of thanes ; 
' Hengestes heap,' Hengest's troop. (Beowulf, 1091.) 

In these words things smith, and heap, it is therefore seen 
how that words which in their visible form have remained 
unchanged, may yet have become greatly changed in regard 
to their place and office in the language. 

Can. We find this verb used in Saxon in a manner 
very like its present employment. But when we examine 
into it, we find the sense attached to it was not as now, that 
o{ possibility, but oi knowledge and skill. When a boy in his 
French Exercises comes to the sentence ' Can you swim ? ' 
he is directed to render it into French by ' Savez vous 
nager?' that is, 'Know you to swim?' The very same idea 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, '^J 

is (philologically) at the bottom of ' Can you swim?' for in 
Saxon cuNNAN is to know : ' Ic can/ I know ; ' J>u canst/ 
thou knowest, &c., &c. And it had a use in Saxon which 
it has now lost, but which it has retained in German, 
where fennen, to know, is the proper word for speaking of 
acquaintance with persons. So in Saxon : ' Canst ]?u |;one 
preost ]?e is gehaten Eadsige?' Knowest thou the priest 
that is called Eadsige? 

On, the preposition, exists in Saxon, but its area of in- 
cidence has shifted. We often find that an Anglo-Saxon 
ON cannot be rendered by the same preposition in modern 
English, e.g. '' Jjone \e he geseah on ]?3ere cyrcan,' whom he 
saw in the church ; ' Landfer^ se oferssewisca hit gesette 
on Leden,' Landferth from over the sea put it into Latin ; 
' Swa swa we on bocum reda^,' as we read in books ; ' Sum 
manu on Winceastre,' a man at Winchester. So strange to 
our modern notions is the position in which we sometimes 
find on, that editors have hardly been able to admit its exist- 
ence, and have wished to read it as ou, that is, ovovof. A 
strong instance of this occurs in the Proclamation of a.d. 
1258, which will be given below. There are, however, in- 
stances in which this preposition needs not to be otherwise 
rendered in modern English, e.g. ' Eode him ]>a ham hal on 
his fotum, se ]?e ser was geboren on bsere to cyrcan :' he went 
off" then home whole on his feet, he who before was borne 
on bier to church. 

One of the least changed is the preposition to. This will 
mostly stand in an English translation out of Saxon : ' And 
se halga him cwse]) to, ponne ]?u cymst to Winceastre,' &c., 
and the saint said to him, when thou comest to Winchester, 
&c. ; ' Se mann wear^ ]>a gebroht to his bedde,' the man was 
then brought to his bed. 

It is on these little oft-recurring words that the frame of 



38 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

the sentence reposes. While they remain the same, many of 
the larger words may change, and the alteration be only 
superficial. But when changes take place in them, we feel 
that the phase of the language is affected. The change 
which has taken place in the preposition with is more than 
the going or coming of many long words. With in Saxon 
meant against, and we have still a relic of that sense in our 
compound verb withstand, which means to stand against, 
to oppose. We have all but lost the old preposition which 
stood where the ordinary with now stands. It was mid, 
and it still keeps its old place in the German nitt. We have 
not utterly lost the last vestiges of it, for it does reappear 
now and then in poetry in a sort of disguise, as if it were 
not its own old self, but a maimed form of a compound 
of itself, amid ; and so it gets printed like this — 'mid. 

An is a word in Saxon and also in modern English, and 
it is the same identical word in the two languages. But in 
the former it represents the first numeral which we now call 
WON and write one; and in the latter it is the indefinite 
article. 

It is not easy to throw light on an ancient speech by de- 
scription, unless the writer is aided by the studies of the 
reader. It would be vain to assume an English public to 
be acquainted with the elder form of their mother tongue ; 
and therefore we are limited to such illustrations as may be 
understood with only a knowledge of modern English. 
Under these circumstances we gladly seize upon the pre- 
positional prefix BE, as it offers an example of much interest, 
and no obscurity. The preposition be, at the time when 
we first become acquainted with it, means about, around ; 
as, ' Forj)am \t he sylf ^viste gewissost be ))am,' forasmuch 
as himself knew best about that. And when it entered into 
verbal composition it was with this meaning of about ; as, 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 39 

BECUMAN", to come about, whence our modern sense of 
become : and it was used with peculiarly telling effect in verbs 
of privation ; thus niman was to take, but beniman was to 
take 2N^2q from ; as if to take away round about, with all the 
expressiveness of the Greek Trepiaipslv. This same sense of 
BE is in bereave, Saxon bereafian, literally to strip off the 
clothing {reaf) round about or from about a person. To 
this class belong the following : beheafdian, to behead ; be- 
landian or belendan, to deprive of land ; bedician, to surround 
with a dyke ; begangan, to go around, to surround ; begyrdan, 
to gird about; behealdan, to hold round about; hehorsian, 
to deprive of horses ; behreawsian, to rue about ; belisnian, 
to castrate ; besittan, to sit round about, to besiege ; bescieran, 
to deprive, lit. shear away from; besyrewian, to surround 
any one with snares ; betynan, to put a barrier {tun) around 
a spot. But in the course of time this original sense of be 
in verbal composition faded from sight, and it made no new 
compounds for a while. At length however, in the tenth and 
eleventh centuries, a vast influx of these compounds rushed 
suddenly into the language. In this second class of be- 
compounded verbs only a faint sense belongs to the prefix. 
Examples : — bequeath, bethink, befall, beget, begin, behove, behide, 
believe, beseech, betell, betrap, bewed, behold, belong, bespeak, 
bestow. An indefinite number of verbs were afterwards made 
in the same way, in which be- had no defineable value what- 
ever, but was just a conventional sign of transitive verbality : 
as, beguile, betray, bespatter, becalm, behance, bedabble, bedaub, 
bedeck, bedew, befit, befool, befriend, begrime, begrudge, behave, 
belabour, belate, belay, beleaguer, belie, belove, bemoan^ beseem, 
beshrew, besot, bestir, and other such in ever increasing 
numbers. It was from the earlier, rather than the latter 
stages, that be took its place in adverbs and prepositions like 
before, beyond, behind, belike, below, beneath, between, betwixt, 



4b SKETCH OF THE RISE 

and in the nouns hehalf, behest, hehoof, in all which the old 
sense of about is clearly discernible. The same is the bi in 
the noun bhvord, a proverb, a good word lost to us, but 
retained by the Germans, SSeiirort. But we see it figuring 
as a mere vague prefix in the modern because, besides. The 
progress of this word from the early time when it had the 
definite sense of around, down to our own day, when it has 
become a mere formative without an assignable signification, 
can thus be traced through its successive stages. But mean- 
while the preposition itself has assumed the form of by, and 
has an instrumental sense after the passive verb, which seems 
entirely foreign to its original use. 

Such were some of the features of the Saxon speech, as 
well as we can illustrate them by a reference to modern 
English. Speaking relatively to the times, it was not a rude 
language, but probably the most disciplined of all the ver- 
naculars of western Europe, and certainly the most cultivated 
of all the dialects of the Gothic barbarians. Its grammar 
was regulated, its orthography mature and almost fixed. 
It was capable, not of poetry alone, but of eloquent prose 
also, and it was equal to the task of translating the Latin 
authors, which were the literary models of the day. The 
extant Anglo-Saxon books are but as a few scattered splinters 
of the old Anglo-Saxon literature. Even if we had no other 
proof of the fact, the capability to which the language had 
arrived would alone be sufficient to assure us that it must 
have been diligently and largely cultivated. To this pitch 
of development it had reached, first by inheriting the relics 
of the Romano-British civilisation, and afterwards by four 
centuries and a half of Christian culture under the presiding 
influence of Latin as the language of religion and of 
higher education. Latin happily did not then what it has 
since done in many Churches ; it did not operate to exclude 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 4 1 

the native tongue and to cast it into the shade, but to the 
beneficent end of regulating, fostering, and developing it. 

Such was the state of our language when its insular se- 
curity was disturbed by the Norman invasion. Great and 
speedy must have been the effect of the Conquest in ruining 
the ancient grammar, which rested almost entirely on literary 
culture. The leading men in the state having no interest 
in the vernacular, its cultivation fell immediately into neglect. 
The chief of the Saxon clergy deposed or removed, who 
should now keep up that supply of religious Saxon literature, 
of the copiousness of which we may judge even in our day 
by the considerable remains that have outlived hostility and 
neglect ? Now that the Saxon landowners were dispossessed, 
who should patronise the Saxon bard, and welcome the man 
of song in the halls of mirth } 

The shock of the Conquest gave a death-blow to Saxon 
literature. There is but one of the Chroniclers that goes 
on to any length after the Conquest ; and one of them stops 
short exactly at a.d. 1066, as if that sad year had bereft his 
task of all further interest. We have Saxon poetry up to 
that date or very near to it, but we have none for some 
generations after it. The Englisc language continued to be 
spoken by the masses who could speak no other ; and here 
and there a secluded student continued to write in it. But 
its honours and emoluments were gone, and a gloomy period 
of depression lay before the Saxon language as before the 
Saxon people. It is not too much to say that the Norman 
Conquest entailed the dissolution of the old cultivated lan- 
guage of the Saxons, the literary Englisc. The inflection- 
system could not live through this trying period. Just as 
we accumulate superfluities about us in prosperity, but in 
adversity we get rid of them as encumbrances, and we like 
to travel light when we have only our own legs to carry us— 



4% SKETCH OF THE RISE 

just so it happened to the Englisc language. For now all 
these sounding terminations that made so handsome a 
figure in Saxon courts — the -an, the -um, the -eka and the 
-ANA, the -iGENNE and -igendum, — all these, superfluous 
as bells on idle horses, were laid aside when the nation had 
lost its old political life and its pride of nationality, and had 
received leaders and teachers who spoke a strange tongue. 

But this was not the only effect of the introduction 
of a new language into the country. The Normans had 
learnt by their sojourn in France to speak French, and this 
foreign language they brought with them to England. 
Sometimes this language is spoken of as the Norman or 
Norman-French. In a well-known volume of lectures on 
the Siudy of Words, published seventeen years ago by the 
present Archbishop of Dublin, the relations between this 
intrusive ' Norman ' and the native speech are given with 
much felicity of illustration. I have the pleasure of inserting 
the following passage here with the permission of the 
author : — 

' We might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it 
turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our 
present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and 
a close observation of the nature and character of those 
which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus 
we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the 
ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of 
dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remark- 
able exception (to be adduced presentl}^), descend to us 
from them — sovereign, sceptre, throne, realm, royalty, homage, 
prince, duke, coujit, {earl indeed is Scandinavian, though he 
must borrow his countess from the Norman,) chancellor, 
treasurer, palace, castle, hall, dome, and a multitude more. 
At the same time the one remarkable exception of king 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 



43 



would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual 
facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in 
not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, 
but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession ; that 
the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more 
than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time 
to assert itself anew. 

' And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, 
almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, 
with chivalry, with personal adornment, is Norman through- 
out; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore 
of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, 
sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire, all the prime 
social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, 
— these are Saxon. Palace and castle may have reached us 
from the Norman, 'but to the Saxon we owe far dearer 
names, the house, the roof, the home, the hearth. His " board" 
too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hos- 
pitable sound than the " table " of his lord. His sturdy arms 
turn the soil; he is the boor, the hind, the churl ; or if his 
Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his 
lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and con- 
tempt, the "villain." The instruments used in cultivating 
the earth, the flail, the plough, the sickle, the spade, are ex- 
pressed in his language; so too the main products of the 
earth, as wheat, rye, oats, here ; and no less the names of 
domestic animals. Concerning these last it is curious 
to observe (and it may be remembered that Wamba, 
the Saxon jester in Ivanhoe, plays the philologer here^) 
that the names of almost all animals, so long as they 
are alive, are thus Saxon, but when dressed and prepared 
for food become Norman — a fact indeed which we might 
^ ' Wallis, in his Grammar, p. 20, had done so before.' 



44 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

have expected beforehand; for the Saxon hind had the 
charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only 
that they might appear on the table of his- Norman lord. 
Thus ox, steer, cow, are Saxon, but heef Norman ; calf is 
Saxon, but veal Norman ; sheep is Saxon, but 7nutton Norman ; 
so it is severally with swine and pork ; deer and venison ; 
fowl and pullet. Bacon, the only flesh which perhaps ever 
came within his reach, is the single exception. 

'Putting all this together, with much more of the same 
kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly 
gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our 
language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior 
and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of Anglo- 
Saxon life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good 
their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation 
as of the after language ; and to the justice of this conclusion 
all other historic records, and the present social condition of 
England, consent in bearing witness.' — Study of Words, 12th 
edit., 1867, pp. 98-100. 

This duplicate system of words in English is the result 
of a long period during which the country was in a bilingual 
condition. The language of the consumer was one, and that 
of the producer another. In the very market at length, the 
seller and the buyer must have spoken diiferent languages. 
But before it came to this, both languages must have been 
familiar to either party. Just as on the frontier of the 
English and Welsh now, there is a large number of people 
who have a practical acquaintance with both languages, while 
they can talk in one only. This it is which has brought 
down upon the Welsh the unjust imputation of saying Dim 
Saesoneg out of churlishness. They may understand the 
enquiry, and yet they may not possess English enough to 
make an answer with. A similar frontier between English 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 45 

and French must have existed in the Norman period in 
every town and almost in every village of England. This 
lasted down to the middle of the fourteenth century, when the 
new mixed language broke forth and took the lead. During 
three centuries, the native language was cast into the shade by 
the foreign speech of the conquerors. All that time French 
was getting more and more widely known and spoken ; and 
it never covered so wide an area in this island as it did at the 
moment when the native speech ilpreared her head again 
to assert a permanent supremacy. As the waters of a river 
are often shallowest there where they cover the widest area, 
so the French language had then the feeblest hold in this 
country, when it was most widely cultivated and most 
generally affected. 

The Saxon had never ceased to be the speech of the body 
of the people. The Conquest could not alter this fact. 
What the Conquest did was to destroy the cultivated Englisc, 
which depended for its propagation upon literature and 
literary men. This once extinct, there was no central or 
standard language. The French language in some respects 
supplied the place of a standard language, as the medium of 
intercourse between persons in the best ranks of society. 
The native speech, bereft of its central standard, fell abroad 
again. It fell back into that divided condition, in which 
each speaker and each writer is guided by the dialect of 
his own locality, undisciplined by any central standard of 
propriety. Our language became dialectic. And hence it 
comes to pass that of the authors whose books are preserved 
from the year a.d. iioo to 1350, no two of them are uniform 
in dialect ; each speaks a tongue of its own. It must be 
understood here, and wherever figures are given to dis- 
tinguish periods in the history of language, that it is intended 
for the convenience of writer and reader, for distinctness of 



46 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

arrangement and as an aid to the memory, rather thaii as 
a rigid Umit. For in such things the two bordering forms 
so shade off and blend into one another, that they are not 
to be rigidly outlined any more than the primary colours in 
the rainbow. 

For convenience sake, we may divide the 'transition' into 
two parts, and add a third era for the infancy of the national 
language : — 

Teansition. 

Br<?ken Saxon (Latin documentary period) from i ico to 1215 
Early English (the French documentary period) i2i5to 1350 
First national English .... 1350 to 1550 

Of the first division of this period, the grand landmarks 
are the two poems of Layamon's Bruf, and the Ormulum ; 
the Brut representing the dialect of the Upper Severn ; and 
the Ormulum having been written (we will say by way of 
a definition) somewhere between London and Peterborough. 

The Brut of Layamon, a work which embodies in a poetic 
form the legends of British history, and which exceeds 30,000 
lines, has been splendidly edited, with an English translation, 
by Sir Frederic Madden, 1847. One of the great excellences 
of this edition is the helpful nature of the Preface. Besides 
the necessary discussions on the language and the date, the 
leading passages for beauty or importance are indicated 
in an easy way, which gives the reader an immediate com- 
mand of the contents of this voluminous work. There is no 
direct intimation of the date at which it was written, but the 
editor has fixed on 1205, for reasons which appear con- 
clusive. But we have only to look at such a poem as this to 
perceive at once that it was not the work of any one year 
or even of a few years. It must be regarded as the literary 
hobby of the whole life of Layamon the priest, who lived at 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 47 

Areley Kings, on the west bank of the Severn, opposite 
Stourport, and who there served the church, being the 
chaplain and inmate of 'the good knight' of the parish. 
And hence it is that the language runs back and claims 
a near relationship to that of the close of the latest Saxon 
Chronicle : nearer than we might have expected from the 
space which separates them in geography. But we must 
remember that we know nothing of Layamon's birthplace 
and the scene of his education. We are only informed as to 
the scene of his life-long service. And though his diction 
bears marks of the western dialect, yet this cannot be af- 
firmed exclusively. It would be tolerably safe to say that 
he wrote in Southern English, inclining to the western 
dialect. In other words, Layamon represents the old dialect 
of Wessex in the twelfth century. But it is easier to 
describe Layamon by his literary than by his local affinities. 
He is the last writer who retains an echo of the literary 
Englisc. Though he wrote for popular use, yet the scholar 
is apparent, and he had conned the old native literature 
enough to give a tinge to his diction, and to preserve a little 
of the ancient grammar. Among the more observable fea- 
tures of his language are the following : — Infinitives in i, le, 
or y ; the use of v for/"/ the use of u for i or jy in such 
words as dude (did), kudde (hid), hulk (hill), puf^e (pit), &c. 
What adds greatly to the philological interest of the £ruf is 
this, that a later text is extant, a text which was plainly 
written in Northumbria, and which bears some distinct 
features of Northern English. This second text has been 
printed by Sir F. Madden parallel with the elder text of 
A.D. 120-5. One of the most salient characters of the 
northern dialect was its avoidance of the old sc initial, 
which developed into the modern s/i. The northern dialect 
in such cases wrote simply s. The northern form for s/ia/l 



48 



SKETCH OF THE RISE 



was sail. So among the tribes of Israel at the time 
of the Judges, it was a peculiarity of the tongue of the 
Ephraimites that they could not frame to pronounce sh, but 
said Sibholeth instead of Shibboleth. This is so definite 
a feature of the northern dialect that it is worth while to 
collect some of the examples in which it makes the contrast 
of the two texts : — 



First Text. 




Second Text. 


Scaft, shaft 




Saft 


Scarpe, sharp 




Sarpe 


ScaeSe. ^.heath 




Seajie 


Seal, scalt, scullen, sculled, shall 


Sai, salt, sollen, soUej) 


Sceldes, shields 




Seldes 


Sceort, short 




Sort 


Scuten, they shot 




Soten 


Sceren, scar ; shear. 


shore 


Seren, sar 


Scean, shone 




Son 


Scip, ship 




Sip 


Scame, shame 




Same 


Sculderen, shoulders 




Soldre 


Scunede, shunned 




Sonede. 



The wall of Severus, which was made against the Picts, is 
called in the elder text scid-wall, that is, wall of separation, 
quasi ©cl)eibe=5Baft ; and in the later or northern text it is 
sid-wal. (Vol. ii. p. 6, ed. Madden.) 

The following specimen is from the elder text of Laya- 
mon's Br tit : — 



THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME OF GLOUCESTER. 



Line 9616. 



fa ].'e time wes ifulled, 
pat hit fulleht sculde habben, 
aefter ])an apelene la3en, 
))at stoden open ilke d2e3en, 
noma heo him arahten, 
and Gloi pat child hahten. 
pis child weex and wel ij)seh ; 
and muchel folc him to bah. 
and Claudien him bitaehte, 



When the time was fidly come 
that it baptism should have 
according to the national laws 
that stood in those same days ; 
a najne they bestowed on him 
and named the child Gloi. 
This child grew and throve well 
and much peop'e bowed to hit7i, 
and Claudien committed to him 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



49 



)>a burh J>e he ahte : 

and sette heo mid cnihten, 

])e gode weoren to fehten. 

and hsehte heo wite wel faste 

and heoten heo Gloichestre : 

al for his sune luuen, 

])e leof him wes an heorten ; 

j)e seoSSe bi5set al Walisc lond, 

to his a3ere hond. 

and J)erof he was deme ; 

and due feole 5ere. 



the borough that he owned, 
and manned it with knights 
which good were to fight, [securely 
And he ordered them to guard it 
and he called it Gloucester; 
all for love of his son 
who was dear to his heart; 
who afterwards conquered all Welsh- 
to his own hand. [lafid 
And thereof he was demster 
and duke many years. 



The next specimen is from the younger or northern 
text :— 



ORIGIN OF BILLINGSGATE. 

Line 6046. 



Nou ich ])e habbe i-sed hou hit his 

agon, 
of KairHun in Glommorgan. 
Go we 5et to Belyn, 
to ])an blisfolle kyinge. 
f o he hadde imaked J)es borh, 
and hit cleopede Kair-Uske : 
po J)e borh was strong and hende; 
po gan he Jeanne wende, 
riht to Londene, 
jjo borh he swij)e louede. 
He bi-gan ])er ana tur ; 
J)e strengeste of alle J)an tune : 
and mid mochele ginne, 
a 3et ])ar hunder makede, 
po me hit cleopede 
Belynes^at. 

Nou and euere more, 
Jje name stondi]) ])are, 
Leuede Belyn Jje king, 
in allere blisse : 
and alle his leode 
:lofde hine swij^e. 
In his dajes was so mochel mete, 
]jat hit was onimete. 



Now I have said to thee how it 

happened, 
touchifig Caerleon in Glamorgan. 
Go we back agaifi to Belyn, 
to that blissful king. 
When he had made the burgh 
and called it Caer-Usk : 
When the burgh was strong and trim, 
the7t gan he wend thence 
right to Lo7idon, 
the burgh he greatly loved. 
He began there a tower 
the strongest of all the town; 
and with much art 
a gate there-under made. 
Then men called it 
' Billingsgate! 
Now and ever-more, 
the name standeth there. 
Lived Belyn the king 
in all bliss : 
and all his people 
loved him greatly. 
In his days was there so much meat, 
that it was without measure. 



The Ormulum may be proximately dated at a.d. 12 15. A'^ 
the date cannot be given with precision, the date ql Magna 

E 



50 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Carta is here selected, for the sake of its bearing on thei 
subject, as will be seen presently. The Ormulum is a 
versified narrative of the Gospels, addressed by Ormin or 
(curtly) Orm to his brother Walter, and after his own name 
called by the author 'Ormulum'; by which designation it is 
commonly known. 

Ice J)att tiss Eniiglish hafe sett I that this English have set 

Enngli£she men to lare,' English men to lore. 

Ice wass ])ser-])aer I cristnedd wass I was there-where I christened was 

Orrmin bi name nemmedd. Ormin by na7ne na?ned. 



piss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum 7*^/5 book is named Ortmdum 
Forr|)i J>att Orrm itt wrohhte. For-this that Orm it wrought. 

This book has been admirably edited, and with the most 
perfect fidelity to the one extant manuscript, by Dr. White, 
formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon. It was printed at the 
Clarendon Press, 1852. As the -Srw/ represents the western 
type of Enghsh, so this does the eastern. In this poem we 
find for the first time the term ' English ' in the mature form. 
Layamon has the forms ejtglisc, englis, cenglis, anglisce, Sec. ; 
but Orm has enngliss^ and still more frequently the fully 
developed form ennglissh. 

The excess of consonants with which this word is written 
is a constant feature of the Oj-mulum. The author was 
one of Nature's philologists, and he displayed his talent by 
attempting a phonetic system of spelling. Had his ortho- 
graphy been generally adopted, we should have had in 
English not only the mm and nn with which German 
abounds, but many other double consonants which we 
do not now possess. How great a study Orm had made 
of this subject, we are not left to gather from observation 
of his spelling, for he has emphatically pointed out the 
importance of it in the opening of his work. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 5 1 



HOW TO SPELL. 

And whase wilenn shall ])iss boc And whoso shall determine to copy 

efft operr sijje writenn this hook, I beg him to write it 

himm bidde ice })att he't write accurately as the book directeth ; and 

rihht that he write a letter twice wherever 

swa summ }>iss boc himm taeche];]) in this book it is so written. Let him 

and tatt he loke wel J)att he look carefully that he write it so, 

an bocstaff write twiggess for else he cannot write it correctly 

eggwhser pser itt uppo J)iss boc in English — of that he may be as- 

iss writen o Jjatt wise suredl 
loke well ])att he't write swa, 
forr he ne magg nohht elless 
on Ennglissh writenn rihht te word, 
t)att wite he well to so])e. 

There is another matter of orthography which is a philo- 
logical peculiarity with this author. When words that begin 
with ]> follow words ending in d or /, he generally (and 
with a few definite exceptions) alters the initial J> to /. 
Where (for example) he has the three words ]>aU and ]>aU 
and ^e succeeding one another continuously, he writes, not 
J)<2// ]>a/f \e, but ^att tatt te. One important exception to this 
rule is where the word ending with the ^ or / is severed from 
the word beginning with ]? by a metrical pause ; in that case 
the change does not take place, as — 

-] agg afFterr ])e Goddspell stannt a7id aye after the Gospel standeth 
Jjatt tatt te Goddspell mene])]?. that which the Gospel meaneth. 

Here the sta7t7it does not change the initial of the next word, 
because of the metrical division that separates them. Other 
examples of these peculiarities may be seen in the follov/ing 
extract. 

CHARACTER OE A GOOD MONK. 

Forr himm birrj) been full clene mann, 

and all wi^futenn ahhte, 
Buttan J)att mann himm findenn shall 

unnome mete and waede. 



^2 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

And tser iss all ))att eor])lig ])ing 

])att minnstremann birr}) aghenn, 
Wi))J}utenn cnif and shaej)e and camb 

and nedle, giff he't georne]?]?. 
And all J^iss shall mann findenn himm 

and wel himm birrj) itt gemenn ; 
For birrj) himm noww])err don Jfseroflf, 

ne gifenn itt ne sellenn. 
And himm birr]) tefre standenn inn 

to lofenn Godd and wurrj)ennj 
And agg himm birr]) beon fressh fasrto 

bi daggess and bi nihhtess ; 
And tat iss hand and Strang and tor 

and hefig lif to ledenn, 
And for])i birr]? wel clawwstremann 

onnfangenn mikell mede, 
Att hiss Drihhtin AUwaeldennd Godd, 

forr whamm he mikell swinnke])]). 
And all hiss herrte and all hiss lusst 

birr]) agg beon towarrd heoffne, 
And himm birr}> geornenn agg ])att an 

hiss Drihhtin wel to cwemenn, 
Wi])]) daggsang and wi])lp uhhtennsang 

wi]>]> messess and wi])}) beness, &c. 



Translation. 

For he ought to he a very pure vtan 

and altogether without property. 
Except that he shall be found in 

simple meat and clothes. 
And that is all the earthly thing 

that minster-man shoidd own. 
Except a knife and sheath and comb 

and needle, if he want it. 
And all this shall they find for him 

and his duty is to take care of it. 
For he may neither do with it, 

neither give it nor sell. 
And he must ever stand in (vigorously) 

to praise and worship God, 
And aye must he be fresh thereto 

by daytime and by nights; 
And that 's a hard and stiff and rough 

and heavy life to lead, 
And therefore well may cloister' d man 

receive a mickle meed 
At the hand of his Lord Allivielding God, 

for zvhom he mickle slaveth. 



i 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. ^'^ 

And all his heart and his desire 

ought aye be toward heaven. 
And he should yearn for that alone, 

his Master well to sei've. 
With daytime-chant and chatit at prime, 

with masses and with prayers, &c. 

Ormin has not, like Layamon, told us where he lived. 
Many opinions have been hazarded on his dialect, but I have 
found the observations of Dr. Guest (^History of English 
Rhythtiis, vol. ii. pp. 209, 409) most appropriate. There is 
this guiding fact, that the initial change of |> to / is found in 
the last section of the Saxon Chronicle E, which we know 
was written at Peterborough. On the other hand, we cannot 
place Ormin in Norfolk or Lincolnshire, as some critics 
would do, because he has not the Anglian mark of s for sh. 
He writes shall and not sail or sal. Though near the 
Anglian border we must class this writer as Saxon and not 
Anglian. 

Before we pass on to the next group, to those which are 
more particularly known as Early English, a remark should 
be made on the significance of the date 12 15, to which we 
are now arrived. It is a marked date as being that of Magna 
Carta; and it is the year in which French first appears in 
our public instruments. After the Conquest Latin was the 
documentary language up to this date, when French began 
and soon became general. It has even been maintained 
that the original language of Magna Carta was French and 
not Latin. But though a critical examination may lead to 
this conclusion, it would be of no value for our present 
purpose, unless it could be shewn that in this kingdom it was 
promulgated in French. And this is very doubtful. The 
first certain example of French in our public muniments is 
that by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, which 
had been facsimiled in the National Manuscripts. If we ask 



54 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

what manner of French it was, we must point to that now 
spoken by the peasants of Normandy, and perhaps still more 
to the French dialect which has been preserved in the 
Channel Islands. A strong trace of this use of French as 
the language of public business in this country still survives 
in the formula LE ROI LE VEUT or LA REINE LE 
VEUT, by which the royal assent to bills is announced in 
Parliament. And in the utterance of this puissant sen- 
tence it is considered correct to groll the r after the m.anner 
of the peasants of Normandy. 

The darkest time of depression for our language has now 
passed. We approach a kind of dawn. A new literature 
begins to rise, first in dissonant dialects, and then in a 
central and standard form. The language had admitted 
a variety of new material which had distinctly affected its 
complexion. One particular class of words shall be noticed 
in this place as the result of the French rule in England. 
This is a group of words which will serve to depict the 
times in which they were stamped on our speech. They 
are the utterance of the violent and selfish passions. 

Almost all the sinister and ill-favoured words which were 
in the English language at the time of Shakspeare, owed 
their origin to this unhappy era. The malignant passions 
were let loose, as if without control of reason or of religion ; 
men hotly pursued after the objects of their ambition, covet- 
ousness, or other passions, till they grew insensible to every 
feeling of tenderness and humanity; they regarded one 
another in no other light but as obstructives or auxiliaries 
in their own path. What wonder that such a state of society 
furnished little or nothing for expressing the delicate 
emotions, while it supplied the nascent English with such 
a mass of opprobious epithets as to have lasted, with few 
occasional additions, till the present day. Of these words 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. ^^^ 

a few may be cited by way of example. And first I will 
instance the \YOTdjuggkr. This word has two senses. It is 
first a person who makes a Kvelihood by amusing tricks. 
Secondly, it has the moral sense of an impostor or deceiver. 
The latter is the prevalent modern use. Both these senses 
originated in the French period of our history. 

To Jape is to jest coarsely; 2.Japer is a low buffoon; japery 
ia buffoonery ; 2,xvd jape-worthy is ignominiously ridiculous. 

To jangle is to prate or babble; 2ij angler is a man-prater, 
and 2, j angler ess is a woman-prater. 

' Bote lapers and langlers. ludasses children.' 

Piers Plowman's Vision, 35. 

Raven is plunder ; raveners are plunderers ; and although 
this family of words is extinct, with the single exception of 
ravenous as applied to a beast of prey, yet they are still 
generally known from the Authorised Version, and they must 
have been current English in 161 1. 

Ribald and ribaldry are of the progeny of this prolific 
period. Ribald was almost a class-name in the feudal 
system. One of the ways, and almost the only way, in which 
a man of low birth who had no inclination to the religious 
life of the monastery could rise into some sort of importance 
and consideration, was by entering the service of a powerful 
baron. He lived in coarse abundance at the castle of his 
patron, and was ready to perform any service of w^hatever 
nature. He was a rollicking sort of a bravo or swash- 
buckler. He was his patron's parasite, bull-dog, and tool. 
Such was the Ribald, and it is not to be wondered at that 
the word rapidly became a synonym for everything rufidanly 
and brutal ; and having passed into an epithet, went to swell 
the already overgrown list of vituperations. 

Rascal, villain, are of the same temper and the same date. 



5^ SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Such are a few of the words with which our language was 
endowed, in its first rude contact with the French lan- 
guage. Though we find nearer our own times, namely^ 
in the reign of Charles the Second, some accordance 
of tone with the early feudal period, yet neither in that 
nor in any other age was there produced such a strain 
of injurious words, calculated for nothing else but to enable 
a man to fling indignities at his fellow. 

The same period is stigmatised by another bad character- 
istic, and that is, the facility with which it disparaged good 
and respectable words. 

Villain, which has been quoted, was simply a class-name, 
by which a humble order of men was designated ; ceorl was 
a Saxon name of like import: both of these became dis- 
paraged at the time we speak of into the injurious sense of 
villain and churl. 

The adjective iniaginatif ^?j& then in use, but it had not 
the worthy sense of imaginative, richly endowed with ideas — 
but simply suspicious. 

The furious and violent life of that period had eveiy need 
of relief and relaxation. This was found in the abandon- 
ment of revelry and in the counteir-stimulant of the gaming- 
table. The very word revelry with its cognates, to revel, 
revelling, revellers, are p^roductions of this period. The rage 
for gambling which distinguished the habits of our Norman- 
French rulers, is aptly commemorated in the fact that up to 
the present day the English terms for games of chance are 
of French extraction. Dice were seen in every hall, and 
v/ere then called by nearly the same name as now. Cards, 
though a later invention, namely, of the thirteenth or begin- 
ning of the fourteenth century, are still appropriately desig- 
nated by a French name. 

The fashion of counting by ace, deuce, trey, quart, cink. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 57 

siz, &c., is French, not modern French, but of the feudal 
age. We find it in Chaucer, precisely as at present : — 

' Seven is my chance, and thin is cink and treye.' 

Canterbury Tales, 12,587. 

Chance itself is one of those gaming terms, and so is 
hazard, which was the prominent word in the phraseology of 
gambling, and accordingly very odious to the moralist of 
that day. In the list of vices hasardery comes in next to 
gluttony, as being that which beset men next after the temp- 
tations of the table. 

' And now that I have spoken of glotonie, 
Now wol I you defenden hasardrie. 
Hasard is veray moder of lesinges, 
And of deceite, and cursed forsweringes. 
It is repreve, and contrary of honour 
For to ben hold a common hasardour.' 

Canterbury Tales, 12,522. 

It is a comfort to observe that even a word may .outlive 
a bad reputation. The word hazard has now little associa- 
tion with disorderly excitement and the thirst for sudden 
wealth ; it suggests to our minds some laudable adventure, 
or elevates the thought to some of those exalted aims 
for which men have hazarded their lives. Another word 
may be cited, which belonged originally to the same ill- 
conditioned strain, but which time has purified and con- 
verted into a picturesque word, no longer a disgrace but 
an ornament to the language. This is jeopardy, at first a 
mere excited and interjectional cry, Jeu perdu ! game lost ! 
or t\iQ, jeu parti! drawn game! — but now a wholesome 
rhetorical word. 

I will close the list of Norman illustrations with one 
example, by simply observing that this was the age which 
gave us the word Fitz as a prefix to family names. This 



58 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

word, the most innocent in the world (being merely the 
Romanesque form of the I^2i\.m films, a son), obtained at this 
period a well-known heraldic import, which it has ever since 
retained. 

The Norman poetic literature of this early period has 
left few traces on our language. We have an intervening 
period to survey before we come to any literary blending 
between the two languages. In this interval, which may be 
rudely defined by the dates 12 15-1350, we see strong efforts 
after a native literature. But as yet these have no centre of 
their own — they hang aloof as it were, and hover provincially 
around the privileged and authoritative languages of French 
and Latin. They have not among themselves a common or 
even a leading form of speech. This is the period that has 
besn so excellently illustrated by the labours of the Early 
English Text Society. 

The first example of the new group is the beautiful 
poem of Genesis and Exodus. Here the word shall is 
thus declined: sing, sal, salt ; pi. sulen. Also srud for 
the Saxon scrud, modern shroud ; and suuen as a par- 
ticiple of the verb which we now write shove. This 
speaks for its Anglian character. This poem exhibits also 
the remarkable feature of he for the Anglo-Saxon hi, equiva- 
lent to the modern they. The date of it is about a.d. 1250, 
and Mr. Morris is probably right in assigning Suffolk as its 
locality. It has that apparent confusion between ^ and d 
for which the last continuation of the Saxon Chronicle (E) 
is remarkable. As a specimen of the language, we may 
quote the butler's narrative of his dream to Joseph in the 
prison : — 

Me drempte ic stod at a win-tre, 7 dreamt I stood at a vine-tree 

Sat adde waxen buges '5re, that bad waxen houghs three. 

Orest it blomede and siSen bar Erst it bloomed arid then it bare 

fSe beries ripe, wurS ic war: the berries ripe, as I was ware : 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 59 

■^e kinges kuppe ic hadde on bond, the king's cup I had in hand, 
Se beries 5or-inne me Shugte ic the berries therein me-thought I 



wrong, 



wrung 



and bar it drinken to Pharaon, and hare it to drink to Pharoah 

me drempte, als ic was wune to don. (/ dreamed) as I was wont to do. 

At the end of his version of Genesis he alludes to himself 
and his work : 

God schilde hise sowle fro helle bale God shield his soid from hell-bale 
Se made it Sus on Engel tale ! that made it thus in English tale ! 

With the Genesis and Exodus may be roughly classed 
as to locality Havlok the Dane, though that poem uses 
the sh. 

But the most remarkable of all the productions of the 
transition period is the poem entitled The Owl and the 
Nightingale. Its locality is established by internal evidence, 
as having been written at or near Portesham in Dorsetshire. 
It is a singular combination of archaic English with ripe and 
mature versification. The forms of words and even the 
terms of expression frequently recall Mr. Barnes's Poems in 
the Dorset Dialect. A prominent feature is the frequent use 
of V where we write /, as vo for foe ; vlize = flies ; vairer = 
fairer; v ra7n= from ; vor^ for; but so for-vorp for 'so far 
forth'; ze;^r^-z'6>r^ = wherefore ; &c. In connection with which 
it ought to be remembered that we in modern English use 
the V in many places where the Saxon orthography had f. 
Instances : — heaven, Saxon heofon ; love, Saxon lufu ; but 
this alteration avoids initial _/"'s which remain with us as in 
Saxon times. The change may be well illustrated by the 
numeral five, Saxon fi/e ; where the first / stands unaltered, 
but the second has been transformed to v. The fact is that 
the break in the continuity of our literary language opened 
the way for much of west-country style that never could have 
been admitted unless such an interruption had taken place* 



6o SKETCH OF THE RISE 

It has already been shewn above that the Saxon literary lan- 
guage was not really native to Wessex, that it was not 
originally Saxon at all, but Anglian. This poem may safely 
be pronounced the oldest extant specimen of the pure 
Wessex dialect. And when we add that it is one of the 
most lovely idylls of any age or of any language, we hope 
that some Englishmen will be induced to master the dialects 
of the thirteenth century, in order to be able to appreciate 
this exquisite pastoral. Its date may be somewhere about 
A.D. 1 280. So far from substituting j for sc { = sh) this poem 
spells schaliu, schule, sckolde, schonde, schame, schake^, schende, 
schuniet, scharp, Sec. On the other hand it tends to soften 
the ch guttural. 

In the Romance 0/ King Alexander we first begin to hear 
a sound as of the coming English language. Most of the 
transition pieces are widely distinct from the diction of 
Gower and Chaucer, but this has the air of a preparation 
for those writers. This romance sometimes resembles not 
distantly the Romaunt of the Rose. The feature which most 
claims attention is the working in of French words with the 
English. This is a translation of the poem which was the 
grand and general favorite before the Romance of the Rose 
superseded it. It was a French work of the year a.d. 1200, 
consisting of 20,000 long twelve-syllable lines, a measure 
which thenceforward became famous in literature, and took 
the name of ' Alexandrine,' after this romance. The EngHsh 
version was made some time in the thirteenth century, in a 
lax tetrameter. It was not till Spenser that the Alexandrine 
metre was systematically employed in our national poetry. 

As the poem was originally French, this may partly ac- 
count for the number of French words and phrases in the 
translation. Partly, but not altogether: Havelok is from a 
French original, but it is very free from French words. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 6 1 

The fact seems to be that this translation carries us into the 
atmosphere of the court ; not only by the variety and pure- 
ness of the French words in it, but also by its metrical resem- 
blance to that eminently courtly work, Chaucer's Romaunt of 
the Rose. Moreover, the language is in other respects so like 
the court-English of the fourteenth century, that we cannot 
but regard it as in a special manner one of the dawning 
lights of the standard language. In Chaucer and Gower 
the French words are often so Anglicised, that a reader 
might pass them for pure Saxon. Not so in the Romance 
of King Alexander. The two languages do not yet appear 
blended together, but only mixed biUngually. The following 
lines will illustrate this crude mixture of French with 
English : 

1. That us telleth the maistres saunz faile. 

2. Hy ne ben no more verreyvient. 

3. And to have horses auenaunt, 
To hem stalworth and asperaunt. 

4. Of alle men hy ben queintest. 

5. Toppe and rugge, and croupe and cors 
Is semblabel to an hors. 

In the rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester we have 
a fine specimen of west-country English, which touches the 
dialect of The Owl and Nightingale at many points; the 
infinitives ending in -i or -y, or -ie, as to conseili = to counsel ; 
he wolde sustemi = he would sustain ; ' he ne let no5t clupie 
al is folc' = he let not call all his folk ; ' due William uorbed 
alle his to rohhy' = duke William forbad all his men to rob ; 
hoseli = to housel .; ' ])is noble due Willam him let crouny king' 
= this noble duke William made them croivn him king. 

But near relationship is not more indicated by similarity 
of grammatical forms than by peculiar applications of pre- 
positions and cunjunctions. The Owl and Nightingale has 
the adverb fort (which is in fact our modern forth) in the 



6% SKETCH OF THE RISE 

prepositional sense of unh'I : as, ' J)U singest from eve /brf 
amor5e' = thou singest from evening un/i'l morning. And 
also conjunctionally, as, ' jjos hule abod /or/ hit was eve' ^ 
this owl abode un/i'l it was evening. In Robert of Gloucester 
we find the same word in the conjunctional sense of unWl, 
as in the address of William to his soldiers after their 
landing : 

' UnderstondaJ) hou ^oure eldeme ])e king nome also, 
And helde him vorie he adde amended ])at he adde misdo.* 

Ye understand how your elders seized the king also, 

And held him until he had amended that he liad ill done. 

But in many cases this dialect differs strongly from 
the Dorset, as exhibited in the Owl and Nightingale. The 
latter has the initial h very constant in such words as 
Ich habhe = I have ; J>u havest = thou hast ; ho hadde = 
she had, &c. ; whereas in Robert of Gloucester it is adde, 
as may be seen in the last quotation. Also he writes is for 
his very frequently, though not constantly. It seems as if 
he put the h to this word when it was emphatic. The 
Dorset, on the other hand, retains the h in hit for it ; writes 
the owl down as a ' hule,' and a ' houle' ; never fails in sh, 
but rather strengthens it by the spelling sch, as scharpe, 
schild, schal, schaj?ie, Sec. ; whereas the Gloucester dialect 
eludes the h in such instances, and writes ss, as ssolde = 
should ; ssipes = ships ; ssriue = shrive ; ssire = shire ; bissopes 
= bishops ; and even Engliss for English, Frenss for French. 

The following line offers a good illustration both of this 
feature, and also of the metre of this Chronicle, which is not 
very equable or regular, but of which the ideal seems to be 
the fourteen-syllable ballad-metre : 

' Hou longe ssoUe hor luj^er heued above hor ssoldren be ? ' 

Morris, Specimens, p. 66. 

How long-a shall their hated heads 
Above their shoulders be ? 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 6^ 

Perhaps this may have been a difference in the ortho- 
graphy rather than in the pronunciation. Which is made 
probable by the substitution of the ss for ck where we must 
suppose a French pronunciation of the c/i, which is about 
the same as our s/i sound. Thus, in the long piece presently 
to be quoted, we have Michaelmas written Missehnassc. 

The Commencement of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, 
as printed by Hearne. Date about 1300. 

Engelond ys a wel god lond, ich wene of eche lond best, 
Yset in the ende of the world, as al in the West. 
The see goth hym al a boute, he stont as an yle. 
tiere fon heo durre the lasse doute, but hit be ihorw gyle 
Of folc of the selue lond, as me hath yseye wyle. 
From South to North he is long eighte hondred myle ; 
And foure hondred myle brod from Est to West to wende, 
_ Amydde tho lond as yt be, and noght as by the on ende. 
Plente me may in Engelond of all gods yse, 
Bute folc yt forgulte other yeres the worse be. 
For Engelond ys ful ynow of fruyt and of tren, 
Of wodes and of parkes, thar joye yt ys to sen ; 
Of foules and of bestes, of wylde and tame al so ; 
Of salt fysch and eche fresch, and fayre ryueres ther to; 
Of welles swete and colde ynow, of lesen and of mede ; 
Of seluer or and of gold, of tyn and of lede ; 
Of stel, of yrn, and of bras ; of god com gret won ; 
Of whyte and of woUe god, betere ne may be non. 

England is a very good land, I ween of every land {the) best ; iet in the 
end of the world, as in the utter west. The sea goeth it all about ; it 
sta?ideth as an isle. Their foes they need the less fear, except it be through 
guile of folk of the same land, as men have seen sometimes. From south 
to north it is eight hundred mile long; and four hundred mile broad to wend 
from east to west, that is, amid the land, and not as by the one end. 
Plenty of all goods men may in England see, unless the people are in faidt 
or the years are bad. For England is full enough of fruit and of trees : 
of woods and of parks, that joy it is to see ; of fowls and of beasts, of wild 
and tame also; of salt fiih a?id eke fre^h, and fair rivers thereto; of wells 
sweet and cold enow, of pastures and of meads ; of silver ore and of gold, 
of tin and of lead ; of steel, of iron, and of brass ; of good corn great store ; 
of wheat and of good wool, better may be none. 

But the most famous and oftest quoted piece of Robert 
of Gloucester is that wherein he sums up the consequences 



64 



SKETCH OF THE RISE 



of the Battle of Hastings. It contains the clearest and best 
statement of the bilingual state of the population in his own 
time, that is, about a.d. 1300. 

pus lo ! Jie Englisse folc vor no3t to grounde com 

Vor a fals king, J>at nadde no ri3t to ]>e kinedom, 

') come to a nywe louerd, ])at more in riste was. 

Ac hor noJ)er, as me may ise, in pur ri3te nas. 

T J)us was in Normannes hond J^at lond ibro3t iwis, 

pat an-aunter 3if euermo keueringe J)er-of is. 

Of 'pe Normans bej) heye men, ])at bej) of Engelonde 

•3 Jie lowe men of Saxons, as ich understonde, 

So J)at 56 se]) in eij)er side wat ri3te 3e abbe]) Jjerto ; 

Ac ich understonde, ])at it was ])oru Godes wille ydo. 

Vor J>e wule ])e men of ]jis lond pur hejiene were, 

No lond, ne no folc a3en hom in armes nere ; 

Ac nou su]?])e ])at ];et folc auenge cristendom, 

■;] wel lute wule hulde J)e biheste Jjat he nom, 

T turnde to sleupe, "3 to prute, ^ to lecherie, 

To glotonie, ~) heye men muche to robberie, 

As ])e gostes in a uision to Seint Edward sede, , 

Wu ]/er ssolde in Engelond come such wrecchede ; 

Vor robberie of heie men, vor clerken hordom, 

Hou God wolde sorwe sende in |)is kinedom. 

Bituene Misselmasse and Sein Luc, a Sein Calixtes day, 

As vel in Jjulke 3ere in a Saterday. 

In ])e 5er of grace, as it vel also, 

A jjousend and sixe '] sixti, J)is bataile was ido. 

Due Willam was })o old nyne "j J)ritti 3er, 

•] on T ])ritti 5er he was of Normandie due er. 

po J)is bataile was ydo, due Willam let bringe 

Vaire is folc, |)at was aslawe, an er];e J)oru alle ])inge. 

Alle ])at wolde leue he 3ef, J^at is fon anerjie bro3te. 

Haraides moder uor hire sone wel 3erne him biso3te 

Bi messagers, ^ largeliche him bed of ire J»inge, 

To granti hire hire sones bodi aner]>e vor to bringe. 

Willam hit sende hire vaire inou, wif/oute eny J)ing ware uore : 

So ]3at it was J)oru hire wij) gret honour ybore 

To ])& hous of Waltham, ~] ibro3t aner])e Jiere, 

In ])& holi rode chirche, ])at he let him-sulf rere. 

An hous of religion, of canons ywis. 

Hit was ])er vaire an erjie ibro3t, as it 5ut is. 

Willam ])\s noble due, })o he adde ido al ])is. 

pen wey he nom to Londone he T alle his. 

As king and prince of londe, wij:) nobleye ynou. 

A5en him wi]) uair procession ];at folc of toune drou, 

-] vnderueng him vaire inou, as king of ])is lond. 

pus com lo Engelond, in. to Normandies hond. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 6^ 

T ])e Normans ne cou])e speke ])o, bote hor owe speche. 

•;j speke French as hii dude at om 'J hor children dude also teche. 

So ])at heiemen of pis lond, ])at of hor blod come, 

Holde]) alle ])ulke speche Jiat hii of horn nome, 

Vor bote a man conne Frenss, me telj> of him lute. 

Ac lowe men holde]) to Engliss "] to hor owe speche jute. 

Ich wene Ipev ne hep in al Jie world contreyes none, 

J^at ne holdej; to hor owe speche bote Engelond one. 

Ac wel me wot uor to conne bojje wel it is, 

Vor J)e more J)at a mon can, the more wurjje he is. 

It will hardly be necessary to translate the whole of this 
passage for the reader. We will modernise a specimen to 
serve as a guide to the rest. The last ten lines shall be 
selected as recording the linguistic condition of the country. 

And the Normans could not then speak any speech hut their own. And 
they spoke French as they did at home, and had their children taught the 
same. So that the high men of this land, that came of their blood, all retain 
the same speech which they brought from their home. For unless a man know 
French, people regard him little. But the low men hold to English, and to 
their own speech notwithstanding. I ween there be no countries in all the 
world that do not hold to their own speech, except England only. But 
undoubtedly it is well to know both ; for the more a man hiows, the more 
worth he is. 

These examples will perhaps suffice to give an idea of the 
dissevered and dialectic condition of the native language 
from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. During this 
long interval the reigning language was French, and this 
fashion, like all fashions, went on spreading and embracing 
a wider area, and ever growing thinner as it spread, till in 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was become an 
acknowledged subject of derision. Already, before 1200, 
the famous Abbot Sampson, of Bury St. Edmunds, was 
thought to have said a good and memorable thing when 
he gave as his reason for preferring one man to a farm rather 
than another, that his man could not speak ^French. The 
French which was spoken in this country had acquired an 
insular character; it was full of Anglicisms and English 
words, and in fact must often have been little more than 

F 



66 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

deformed English. Even well-educated persons, such as 
Chaucer's gende and lady-like Prioress, spoke a French 
which, as the poet informs us, was utterly unlike 'French 
of Paris/ What then must have been the French of the 
homely upland fellows Trevisa tells of: 'Jack wold be a 
gentleman yf he coude speke Frensche/ 

In Piers Plowman we have the dykers and delvers with 
their bits of French, doing a very bad day's work, but 
eminently polite to the ladies of the family : — 

' Dykers and Delvers that don here werk ille, 

And driveth forth the longe day, with " Deu vous saue, dam Emme."' 

Piers Plowman's Prologue, 103. 

Perhaps it is a song they sing, as the latest editor, Mr. 
Skeat, takes it. This will serve equally well or even better 
to illustrate the complete diffusion of the French language 
among all ranks; and we might imagine, that now foe the 
second time in history it was on a turn of the balance 
whether Britain should produce nationality of the Roman- 
esque or of the Gothic type. But in the meantime the native 
tongue was growing more and more in use and respect, 
and at length, in the middle of the fourteenth century, 
we reach the end of its suppression and obscurity. 
Trevisa fixes on the great plague of 1349 as an epoch after 
which a change was observable in regard to the popular 
rage for speaking French. He says : 'This was moche used 
tofore the grete deth, but sith it is somdele chaunged.' But 
the most important date is 1362, when the English language 
was re-installed in its natural rights, and was established as 
the language of the Courts of Law. 

In the review of specimens of English which have passed 
before us, we are struck with their diversity and the absence 
of any signs of convergency to a common type. The only 
feature which they agree in with a sort of growing consent, 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 6"] 

is in the dropping of the old inflections and the severance 
of connection with the old Anglo-Saxon accidence. Among 
the most tenacious of these inflections was the genitive plural 
of substantives in -ena (Anglo-Saxon), and of adjectives in 
-ra. This -eria drooped into the more languid -ene; and 
the -ra appeared as -er or -r. Of the latter we shall have 
occasion to speak when we come to Chaucer. 

Mr. Morris has produced from this period the plural 
genitives apostlene veet^^eet of the apostles; deovlene fere = 
companion of devils ; englene songs = songs of angels ; e'^ene 
ivepynge = weeping of the eyes ; Jewene lawe = law of the 
Jews ; prophetene gestes = records of the prophets ; and many 
others. According to him it lived on in the south till near 
the close of the fourteenth century, after it had long been 
discontinued in the north. But whatever traces may be 
found of local tenacity, the general movement was one and 
identical, namely, to divest the language of the old inflections. 
Any other tangible evidence Of drawing towards a standard 
conformity it is difficult to find. If inter-communication at 
certain points tended towards the smoothing out and gene- 
ralising of local peculiarities, this was more than com- 
pensated for by isolation at other parts, and the continued 
production of new idioms. 

, -:In fact we have a phenomenon to account for. In 
> the.: fourteenth century there suddenly appeared a standard 
•English language. It appeared at once in full vigour, and was 
acknowledged on all hands without dispute. The study of 
the previous age does not make us acquainted with a general 
process of convergency towards this result, but rather in- 
dicates that each locality was getting confirmed in its own 
peculiar habits of speech, and that the divergence was 
growing wider. Now there appeared a mature form of 
English which was generally received. 

F 2 



68 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

The two writers of the fourteenth century who most 
powerfully display this language are Chaucer and Gower. 
Piers Plowman is in a dialect; Wiclif's Bible Version is in 
a dialect : but Chaucer and Gower write in a speech which 
is thenceforward recognised as The English Language, 
and which before their time is hardly found. This seems to 
admit of but one explanation. It must have been simply the 
language that had formed itself in the court about the per- 
son of the monarch. Chaucer and Gower differ from the 
other chief writers of their time in this particular, which they 
have in common between themselves, that they were both 
conversant with court Hfe, and moved in the highest regions 
of English society. They wrote in fact King's English. 
This advantage, joined to the excellence of the works them- 
selves, procured for these two writers, but more especially for 
Chaucer, the preference over all that had written in English. 
We have not yet done indeed with provincial specimens, 
even among our most important examples of English ; but 
we are from this date in possession of a standard, relatively 
to which all diverging forms of English are local and 
secondary. Having a standard, we are now in a position 
for the first time to designate all other Enghsh as 'pro- 
vincial.' 

An admiring foreigner (I think it was M. Montalembert), 
among other compliments to the virtues of this nation, 
observed, as a proof of our loyalty and our attachment to 
the monarchy, that we even call our roads * the Queen's 
Highways,' and our language ' the Queen's English' ! No 
Englishman would wish to dim the beauty of the sentiment 
here attributed to us, nor need we think it is disparaged 
though a matter-of-fact origin can be assigned to each of 
these expressions. Of the term 'King's Highway' the 
origin is historically known. When there were many juris- 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 6g 

dictions in this country, which were practically independent 
of the crown, the border-lands of the shires where jurisdic- 
tion might be uncertain, and likewise the highways, ap- 
pertained to the royal jurisdiction. That is to say, a crime 
committed on the highway was as if committed in the King's 
own personal domain, and fell to his courts to judge. The 
highways were emphatically under the King's Peace, and 
hence they came to be (for a very solid and substantial 
reason, at a time when travellers sorely needed to have their 
security guaranteed) spoken of as the 'King's Highways.' 
This is known from the best of records; namely, the old 
laws concerning jurisdictions. Of the origin of the term 
' King's English ' we have not any direct testimony of this 
kind ; but it seems that it may be constructively shewn, at 
least as a probability, that it was originally the term to 
designate the style of the royal proclamations, charters, 
and other legal writings, by contrast with the various dialects 
of the provinces. 

As a little collateral illustration and confirmation of 
this view, it may be not amiss to observe that the style 
of penmanship in^ which such documents were then written 
has always been known as ' Court Hand.' 

Ever since the time of the Archbishop Stephen Langton, 
in the reign of King John, it had been usual to employ 
French in the most select documents, instead of Latin, which 
had been in general use from the time of the Conquest. 
Hallam tells us, on the authority of Mr. Stevenson, that ' all 
letters, even of a private nature, were written in Latin till the 
beginning of the reign of Edward I (soon after 1270), when 
a sudden change brought in the use of French.' But neither 
of these strange languages were suitable for edicts and 
proclamations addressed to the body of the people, and we 
may suppose that the vernacular was generally employed for 



70 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

this purpose, although few examples have survived. The 
earliest extant piece of this class is in the reign of Henry III, 
in the year 1258, and it is one of those which have been 
photozincographed by Colonel Sir Henry James in the 
Facsimiles of National Manuscripts. 



Proclamation of Henry III, sent to the several Counties 
of England, a.d. 1258. 

[This copy is addressed to the inhabitants of Huntingdonshire.] 

^ Henr', ])ur3 Godes fultume, King on Engleneloande, Lhoauerd on Yrloand, 
Duk on Norm' on Aquitain' and eorl on Aniow, send igretinge to alle hise 
holde, ilaerde and ilaewede on Huntendon' schir'. 

pset witen je wel alle \>xX we willea and unnen jjaet. Jiset vre rsedesmen 
alle o];er })e moare d^l of heom, ]jaet beo]) ichosen ]>ur3 us and )>ur3 Jjset 
loandes folk on vre kuneriche, habbej) idon and schuUe don. in J)e worj^nesse 
of Gode and on vre treowj^e, for ];e freme of ])e loande. ];ur3 ]je besi^te of 
]>an toforen iseide redesmen. beo stedefiESt and ilestinde in alle finge abuten 
aende. 

And we hoaten alle vre treowe, in ])e treowjje jjset heo vs 03en. ))aet heo 
stedefaestliche healden and swerien to healden and to werien J)e isetnesses ])aet 
beon imakede and beon to makien, })iir3 J)an to foren iseide raedesmen ojjcr 
])ur3 J)e moare dsel of heom, alswo alse hit is biforen iseid. 

And Jjaet sehc o|ier helpe jjset for to done, bi J)an ilche o|)e a3enes alle men. 
Ri3t for to done and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of e3te. 
wherj)ur3 J)is besigte mu3e beon ilet o])er iwersed on onie wise. And 3if oni 
o])er onie cumen her on3enes, we willen and hoaten jjaet alle vre treowe heom 
healden deadliche ifoan. 

And for \xX we willen Jjsset J»is beo stedefaest and lestinde. we senden 3ew 
J)is writ open, iseined wij) vre seel, to halden a manges 3ew ine hord. Wit- 
nesse vs seluen set Lunden', ])ane e3tetenj)e day. on ])e monjje of Octobr' in 
\t two and fowerti3])e 3eare of vre cruninge. 

And ]?is wes idon tetforen vre isworene redesmen. Bonefac' Archebischop 
on Kant'bur'. Walt' of Cantelow. Bischop on Wirechestr'. Sim' of Miintfort. 
Eorl on Leirchestr'. Ric' of Clar' eorl on Glowchestr' and on Hurtford. 
Rog' Bigod. eorl on Northfolk and marescal on Engleneloand'. Perres of 
Sauveye, Will' of fFort, eorl on Aubem', Joh' of Plesseiz eorl on Ware- 
wik. Joh' Geffrees sune. Perres of Muntefort. Ric' of Grey. Rog' of 
Mortemer. James of Aldithel and aetforen oJ;re mo5e, 

^ And al on \o ilche worden is isend in to seurihce o|)re shcire ouer al 
])aere kuneriche on Engleneloande. And ek in tel Irelonde. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 7 1 

Here we remark that in 1258 the letter ]? (called 'Thorn') 
was still in common use. There is one solitary instance of 
the Roman th in the above document, and that is in a family 
name ; by which we may suppose that the th was already 
recognised as more fashionable. The following is the modern 
English of this unique proclamation. 

H Henry, through Gods help, King in England, Lord in Ireland, Duke in 
Normandy, in Aquitain, and Ear'l in Anjou, sends greeting to all his subjects, 
learned and lay, in Huntingdonshire. 

This know ye ivell all that we will and grant that that which our counsel- 
lors all or the more part of them, that be cho^ren through us and throtigh the 
land's folk f;z our kingdom, have done and shall do, in the reverence of God 
and in loyalty to us, for the good of the land, through the care of these 
aforesaid counsellors, be stedfast and lasting in all things without end. 

A nd we enjoin all our lieges, in the allegiance that they us owe, that they 
stedfastly hold, and swear to hold and to maintai7i the ordinances that be 
made and shall be made through the aforesaid counsellors, or through the 
more part of them, in manner as it is before said. 

And that each help the other so to do, by the same oath, against all men : 
Right for to do and to accept. And none is to take land or money, where- 
through this provisioji may be let or damaged in any wise. And if any 
person or persons come tbere-against, we will and enjoin that all our lieges 
them hold deadly foes. 

And, for that lue will that this be stedfa'it and lasting, we send you this 
writ open, signed wi'h our seal, to hold amongst you in hoard (store). Wit- 
ness ourselves at London, the eighteenth day in the mo7ith of October, in the 
two and fortieth year of our crowning. 

And this was do?ie in the presettce of our sworn coumeUors, Boniface, Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury ; Walter of Cantelow, Bishop of Worcester ; Simofi of 
Monifort, earl of Leices'er ; Richard of Clare, earl of Gloiicester and Hert- 
ford; Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and Marshal of England ; Piers of 
Savoy; Williani of Fort, earl of Albernarle ; John of Plesseiz, earl of 
Warwick; John Gefferson ; Piers of Montfort ; Richard of Grey; Roger 
of Mortimer ; James of Aldithel, — and in the presence of many others. 

^ And all in the like words is sent in to every other shire over all the king- 
dom of England : and also i?i to Ireland. 

This is not a specimen of ' King's English/ nor of any 
type of English that ever had a living existence. It is to 
English something Hke what the Hindustani of one of our 
Indian interpreters might be to the spoken language of the 



72 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

natives — good enough to be understood of the people, and 
clumsy enough to betray the hand of the stranger. It is a 
piece of official English of the day, composed by the clerk to 
whom it appertained, off notes or an original draft, which (in 
either case) were couched in French. The strength of the 
composition consists in set and estabhshed phrases, which 
had long been in use for like purposes, and which betray 
themselves by their flavour of anachronism here. Such 
2iTe, /uUiime, willen and unnen, isetnesses, on in places where 
it was no longer usual, and other less palpable anachronisms, 
among which we should probably reckon the use of the word 
hord. 

That this proceeds from the pen of one whose sphere was 
more or less outside the people, appears from the over- 
charged rudeness and broadness of many of the forms, 
running on the verge of caricature. Such are, loande, Lhoa- 
uerd, moare, hoaten,/oangen, CBurihce, shcire, tel. 

The proportion of French words is so small, compared to 
the literary habits of the date, that it is plain they have been 
studiously excluded, and that with a needless excess of 
scruple; for a vast number of French words must before 
now have become quite popular. Besides iseined and 
crujimge the translator might perhaps have safely ventured 
on the word purveance ( = providence, provision, care), which 
is what he had under his eye or in his mind when he in two 
places employed the uncouth native word hesigie — a word 
which probably is nowhere else found. 

This specimen has been brought forward here in order 
by this example to make it plain what ' King's English ' 
was not. To exhibit, on the other hand, what it was, I am 
obliged to step forward over a century, and take a piece of 
royal correspondence, in order that we may make sure what 
manner of English was in use in the royal family at that 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. J-^ 

time. The following letter from Henry Prince of Wales 
(afterwards Henry V) to his father, is one of those pieces 
which enable us to trace the progress of the English lan- 
guage at its centre, and the exactness of the copy may be 
relied on as it is one of the pieces given in the photozinco- 
graphed National Manuscripts of the Ordnance Survey. 

Henry Prince of Wales to his father Henry IV, 

A.D. 1402. 

My soverain lord and fader, I Recomande me to yowr good and gracieux 
lordship, as humbly as I can, desiring to heere as good tydingges of yow and 
yowr hye estat, as ever did liege man of his soverain lord. And, Sir, I trust 
to God that ye shal have now a companie comyng with my brother of 
Bedford that ye shal like wel, in good feith, as hit is do me wite, Never- 
thelatter my brothers mainy [companyl have I seyn, which is right a tal 
meyny. And so schal ye se of thaym that be of yowr other Captaines 
leding, of which I sende yow al the names in a rolle, be \by] the berer of this. 
Also so. Sir, blessid be God of the good and gracieux tydingges that ye have 
liked to send me word of be [by] Herford your messager, which were the 
gladdist that ever I my3t here, next yowr wel fare, be my trouth : and Sir 
with Goddes grace I shal sende al thise ladies as ye have comandid me, in al 
hast beseching yow of yowr lordship that I myjt wite how that ye wolde 
that my cosine of York shuld reule her, whether she shuld be barbid 
or not, as I have wreten to yow my soverain lord afore this tyme. And, 
Sir, as touching Tiptot, he shal be delivered in al hast, for ther lakkith 
no thing but shipping which with Goddes grace shal be so ordeined for that 
he shal not tary. Also Sir, blessid be God, yowr gret ship the Grace Dieu 
is even as redy, and is the fairest that ever man saugh, I trowe in good 
feith ; and this same day th' Erie of Devenshir my cosin maad his moustre 
[muster] in her, and al others have her [their] moustre the same tyme that 
shal go to ]pe see. And Sir I trowe ye have on [one] comyng toward yow 
as glad as any man can be, as far as he shewith, that is the King of Scotts : 
for he thanketh God that he shal mowe shewe be experience th' entente of 
his goodwill be the suffrance of your good lordship. My soverain lord more 
can I not write to yowr hynesse at this time ; but y ever I beseche yow of 
your good and gracieux lordship as, be my trouth, my witting willingly I shal 
never deserve the contrary, that woot God, to whom I pray to send yow al 
J)' yowr hert desireth to his plaisance. Writen in yowr tovn of Hampton, 
the xiiij*'' day of May. — ^Yowr trewe and humble liege man and sone, H. G. 

Between these two pieces, namely, that of a.d. 1258 and 
that of A.D. 1402, a period of 140 years had elapsed; but 
even this period, which represents four generations of men, 



74 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

would not suffice to allow for the transition of the one into 
the other in the way of lineal descent. In fact they are not 
on the same track. The one is a fossihsed sample of con- 
fused provincialisms, the other a living and breathing utter- 
ance of ' King's English/ And this King's English must 
have been long in preparation before it made its public 
appearance, and still longer before the date of any extant 
record of such appearance. The Romance of King Alex- 
ander, which appeared in the latter part of the thirteenth 
century, has already been noticed as perhaps the earliest 
literary indication. The following piece has something of 
the Court English about it, but perhaps it is not in a very 
good state of preservation. It is taken from Warton's 
History of English Poetry (ed. Price). 



Selections from an Elegy on the Death of King Edward /, 
who died A.J). 1307. 



A lie that beo]) of huerte trewe 

A stounde herkne]) to my song, 
Of Duel that De]; ha]> diht vs newe, 

That make]) me S3'ke ant sorewe among: 
Of a knyht that wes so strong 

Of wham God haj) done ys wlUe; 
Me ])uncke]) that De)i haJ) don vs wrong, 

That he so sone shal ligge stille. 



Al Englond ahte forte knowe 

Of wham that song is that y synge, 
Of Edward kyng that lij) so lowe, 

Yent al this world is nome con springe : 
Trewest mon of alle J'inge, 

Ant in wcrre war ant wys ; 
For him we ahte oure honden wrynge, 

Of Christendome he ber the pris. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. "] ^ 



Nou is Edward of Carnaruan 

King of Eiiglelond al aplyht ; 
God Itte him ner be worse man 

Then is fader, ne lasse of myht, 
To holdcn is pore men to ryht, 

Ant vndtrsLOude good consail ; 
Al Engel ind forte wisse ant diht ; 

Of gode knyhtes darh him nout fail. 

XI. 

Thah mi tonge were mad of stel 

Ant min herte ygote of bras 
The godnesse myht y neuer telle 

That with kyng Edward was. 

Teanslation. 

All ye that be true of heart, hearken ye a while to my song, of grief that 
death hath la'ely done us, which maketh me sigh and sorrow as I sing: 
of a hiight who was so strofig, that God hath accomplished His ptirpose 
by his hands ; methinhs that Death has done us wrong, that he so soon must 
lie still. 

All England ought for to knew of whom the song is that I sing — of 
Edward the king that lieth so low, over all this world his name did spring : 
truest mail ifi all hisiness, and in war cautious and wise ; for him we ought 
to vjring our hands ; he boi'e the palm of Christendom. 



Now is Edward of Caernarvon king of Englofid assi-iredly. God grant 
he be never a worse man than his father, nor less in might, to support his 
poor men to (obtain their) rights, and to understand good counsel ; for to 
gtdde and direct all England — of good knights shall not him fail. 

Though my tongue were made of steel, and my heart cast in brass, I should 
never be able to tell the goodness that was about king Edward. 

But it is in the writings of Chaucer and Gower that we 
have for the first time the full display of King's EngHsh, 
These two names have been coupled together all through 
the whole course of English literature. Skelton, the poet 
laureate of Henry VII, joins the. two names together. So 
does our literary king, James I. So have all writers who 
have had occasion to speak of the fourteenth century, down 
to the present day. Indeed, Chaucer himself may be almost 
said to have associated Gower's name permanently with his 



76 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

own literary and poetical fame, in the terms with which he 
addressed his Troylus and Creseide to Gower and Strode, 
and asked their revision of his book : 

' O moral Gower, this boke I directe 
To the, and to the philosophical Strode, 
To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte, 
Of youre benignites and zeles good.' 

Thus these two names have grown together, and their con- 
nection is soldered by habit and tradition. One is apt to 
imagine, previous to a study of their works, that they were 
a par nohile fratrum, brothers and equals in poetry and 
genius, and that they had contributed equally, or nearly 
so, towards the making of English literature. But this 
is very far from being the case. That which united them 
at first, and which continues to be the sole ground of 
coupling their names together, is just this, — that they wrote 
in the same general strain and in the same language. By 
this is meant, first, that they were both versed in the 
learning then most prized, and both delivered what they 
had to say in the terms then most admired ; and secondly, 
that both wrote the English of the court. If affinity of 
genius had been the basis of classification, the author of 
Piers Plowman had more right to rank with Chaucer than 
the prosaic Gower. But in this Chaucer and Gower are 
united in that they both wrote the particular form of English 
which was henceforward to be estabHshed as the standard 
form of the national language, and their books were the 
leading EngUsh classics of the best society down to the 
opening of a new era under Elizabeth. 

And now the question naturally rises. What was this new 
language % what was it that distinguished the King's English 
from the various forms of provincial English of which 
examples have been given in the group of writers noticed 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. ' 77 

above, or from Piers Plowman and other provincial con- 
temporaries of Chaucer ? In answer to this it may be said, 
that it is no more possible to convey the idea of a language 
by description than of a piece of music. The writings must 
be looked into by all who desire to realise the distinctions 
here to be pointed out. A moderate course of reading, such 
as that laid out in Mr. Morris's Specimens of Eai'ly English 
would enable a student to follow our description. 

The leading characteristics of the King's English — the 
characteristics by which it is distinguished from the pro- 
vincial dialects — are only to be understood by a considera- 
tion of the vast amount of French which it had absorbed. 
It is a familiar sound to hear Chaucer called the ivell of 
English undefiled. But this expression never had any other 
meaning than that Chaucer's language was free from those 
foreign materials which got into the English of some cen- 
turies later. Compare Chaucer with the provincial English 
writers of his own day, and he will be found highly Frenchified 
in comparison with them. Words which are so thoroughly 
naturalised that they now pass muster as ' English undefiled/ 
will often turn out to be French of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries. Who would suspect such a word as blemish of 
being French ? and yet it is so. It is from the old French 
adjective blesme, which meant sallow, wan, discoloured ; and 
its old verb blesmir, which meant as much as the modern 
French verbs tacher and salir, to spot and to soil. Then there 
is the very Saxon-looking word with its w initial, to warish, 
meaning to recover from sickness. Richardson, in his Dic- 
tionary, has provided this word with a Saxon derivation, 
by connecting it with being ware or wary, and so taking 
care of oneself. But it is simply the French verb guesir. 
These are only two of a whole class of French verbs which 
have put on the English termination -ish ; such as to banish, 



78 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

emhellish, flourish, nourish, punish, burnish, furnish, perish, 
finish, from the French verbs nourrir, fleurir, emhellir, bannir, 
punir , finir , perir , fournir , burnir (now brunir). They were 
made subject to the usages of English grammar, as if they 
had been true natives. Thus we find in Chaucer's Legende 
of Goode Women, the verb banish with the Saxon verbal 
prefix y-, as — 

' And Brutus hath by hire chaste bloode yswore, 
That Tarquyn shuld ybanysshed be therfore.' 

French words in Chaucer and Gower will sometimes 
assume a form which is literatim identical with some common 
English word. For instance, the French verb burnir just 
cited appears in both these poets in the strangely English 
and absolutely misleading form oi burned: — 

' . . . wrought al of bt/rned Steele.' 

Knight's Tale, 2185; ed. Tyrw. 

' An harnois as for a lustie knight 
Which burned was as silver bright.' 

Gower, Confessio Atnantts. 

And the French poulet, which then meant a young child, 
is Anglicised into something which looks like the participle 
of the verb to pull, in the Prologue 177: — 

' He yaf not of the text a pulled hen, 
Which saith that hunters ben not holy men.' 

The difference of look between the French initial gu and 
the English initial w often masks a French word. Thus, 
ward and warden are from the French verb guarder and the 
French noun guardien. In Chaucer the French word gateau 
(a cake), anciently ^(2j/<?/, takes the form oi ivastel. A large 
number of words which are thoroughly imbedded into our 
speech, and of which the foreign origin would not be readily 
suspected, might here be enumerated. In the following list 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 79 

of French words out of Chaucer some such may be 
found : — 



accept 


conclude 


effect 


accord 


conclusion 


enchantment 


acquaint 


conquest 


endite 


add 


conscience 


enrlure 


advance 


consider 


engender 


adventure (aventure) 


content 


ensample 


adverre 


cook 


envy 


amiable 


cope 


estate 


array 


cordial 


excellence 


ascendant 


coronation 


exchange 


assay 


countenance 


face 


assent 


country 


faculty 


assize 


courteous (curteys) 


felicity 


auditor 


covenant 


felony 


avaunt 


cover 


figure 


azure 


coverchief 


flower 


banish 


cruel 


folly 


beast 


cure 


forest 


beauty 


custom 


form 


benign 


dainties 


fortune 


besiege 


damn 


fraternity 


blame 


dance 


gay 


blanc-mange 


danger 


gentle 


boil 


debate 


geometry 


caitiff 


defence 


governance 


cape 


degree 


grant 


carpenter 


delight 


harbour 


carry 


depart 


haste 


cattle 


description 


haunt 


cause 


desire 


honest 


celestial 


■ destiny 


honour 


certain 


devour 


horrible 


champion 


diet 


host 


chance 


digestible 


hour 


charm 


diligent 


humble 


cheer 


discreet 


humour 


chivalry 


discretion 


image 


chivalrous 


disdain 


increase 


circuit 


dislodge 


infernal 


city 


dispite 


instrument 


commission 


distress 


intent 


company 


division 


jailor 


compass 


doctor 


jangle 


compassion 


double 


jeopardy 


complain 


doubt 


jewel 


complexion 


dress 


jocund 



8o 



SKETCH OF THE RISE 



join 


party 


sauce 


jolly CjoHf) 


pass 


save 


journey 


patent 


school (scole) 


joy 


patient 


scholar (scoler) 


judge 


perfect (parfite) 


science 


justice 


person 


season 


language 


pestilence 


sentence 


large 


philosophy 


servant 


largess 


philosopher 


service 


lineage 


pity 


session 


madam 


place 


siege 


magic 


plain 


sign 


malady 


please 


simple 


manner 


pleasant 


sire 


mansion 


plenteous 


skirmish 


mantle 


poignant 


sober 


marriage 


pomp 


solace 


master 


poor 


solemn 


matter 


port 


sounding 


measureable 


pouch 


space 


meat 


pound 


special 


memory 


pourtray 


spend 


mercenary 


powder 


squire 


merchant 


practiser 


stable, adj. 


minister 


prince 


statute 


miracle 


princess 


story 


mischief 


prison 


strait 


moist 


privily 


study 


monster 


prize 


substance 


moral 


process 


superfluity 


mortal 


promise 


supper 


natural 


prove 


table 


note 


purchase 


tavern 


nourishing 


quit 


/ tempest 


obstacle 


ransom 


tent 


obstinate 


region 


term 


office 


rehearse 


theatre 


officer 


remedy 


tower 


opinion 


renown 


treason 


oppression 


rent 


tyranny 


ordain 


request 


tyrant 


ordinance 


restore 


usage 


ostler (hostiler) 


reverence 


very 


pace 


robe 


victual (vitaille) 


paint 


rote 


virtue (vertu) 


pair 


royally (realliche 


virtuous 


parliament (par- 


and roially) 


visit 


lement ) 


rude 




parochial 


sanguine 





OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 8 1 

These words are still in our language, and beyond these 
there are large numbers of French words in Chaucer which 
have since been disused, or so much altered as to be of 
questionable identification. All such have been omitted 
from this Hst. 

Sometimes we meet with lines which are almost wholly 
French : — 

' Was verray felicitee parfite' Prol. 340 

' He was a verray perjit practisour.' Prol. 424. 

' He was a verray par jit gentil knight.' Prol. 72. 

* And sikerly she was of greet desport. 
And ful plesaunt and amyable of port ; 
And peyned hire to countrefete chiere 
Of Court, and been estatlich of manere ; 
And to been holden digne of reuerence.' Prol. 137. 

But we have proofs of more intimate association with the 
French language than this amounts to. The dualism of 
our elder phraseology has already been mentioned. It is 
a very expressive feature in regard to the early relations of 
English with French. Words run much in couples, the one 
being Enghsh and the other French : and it is plain that 
the habit was caused by the bilingual state of the popula- 
tion. It is a very curious object of contemplation, and we 
will collect a few of them here : 

aid and abet. 

baile and borowe. 

a wel good wriht a carpentere. Prol. 614. 

uncouthe and strange. Chaucer s Dreme, vol. vi. p. 57; ed. BelL 

nature and kind. Ibid. p. 55. 

disese and wo. Ibid. p. 102. 

mirth and jolHty. 

huntynge and venerye. Canterbury Tales, 2308. 

steedes and palfreys. Ibid. 2495. 

chiere and face. Ibid. 2586. 

Sometimes this feature might escape notice from the 
alteration that has taken place in the meaning of words. 

G 



8^ SKETCH OF THE RISE 

In the following quotation from the Prologue, there are two 
of these diglottisms in a single line : 

' A knyght ther was and that a worthy man, 
That Iro the tyme ]jat he first bigan 
To ryden out, he loued chiualrye, 
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.' 

The last line contains four nouns to express two ideas. 
'Trouthe' u 'honour/ and 'fredom' is 'curteisye.' The 
formula, ' I plight thee my troth,' is equal to saying, ' I pledge 
thee my honour,' only the former is a more solemn way of 
saying it — the word /ro/k having been reserved for more 
impressive use. The ^ox^ freedom employed in the sense 
of gentlemanhke manners, politeness, as the equivalent of 
courtesy, is to be found by a study of our early poetry. 

These examples may suffice to shew that this prevalent 
coupling of words, one English with one French, is not to 
be explained as a rhetorical exuberance. It sprung first out 
of the mutual necessity felt by two races of people and two ^ 
classes of society to make themselves intelligible the one 
to the other. And it is, in fact, a putting of colloquial 
formulae to do the duty of a French-English and an English- 
French vocabulary. 

But the two languages became yokefellows in a still more 
intimate manner. Compounds of the most close and per- 
manent kind were formed bilingually. Some of them exist 
in the present English. In besiege we have a Saxon pre- 
position, of which much has been said above, linked to 
a French verb sieger, to sit ; and the compound means to sit 
around a place. The old word which this hybrid sup- 
planted was besittan, from which we still retain the verb 
to beset. So in like manner the genuine Saxon bewray was 
superseded by the hybrid betray. 

But there is a combination of a yet more intimate kind 
between the two languages. Old English words which were 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 83 

retained in the language were retained as mere representatives ' 
of some French word. They were divorced from their old 
sense, and made to take a sense from some French word of 
contiguous idea. A good example offers in the Prologue : 

' And thogh ]?at he weere worthy he was wys, 
And of his poort as meke as is a mayde : 
Ne neuere yet no viieynye ne sayde 
In al his lyf vnto no manere wight : 
He was a verray periit gentil knyght.' ' 

The first line means that although the knight was valiant, 
yet was he modest, gentle, well-disciplined, sober-minded, 
as the lines following explain. The word wys or ivise here 
does duty for the French sage, of which it is enough to say 
that French mothers at the present day, when they tell a 
child to be good, they say Sots sage. It would be a bald 
rendering of this maternal admonition if it were verbally 
Englished Be wise. Equally far is the use of the word wise 
in that passage of Chaucer, both from the old Saxon sense 
and our modern use. We now use the word just as our early 
ancestors did, having dropped the French colouring which it 
had received. But though that colouring has faded out, yet 
it is not on that account the less available as evidence of the 
intimacy that once existed between the two languages. 

As a result of this redistribution of form and sense, it 
happened that words and phrases were produced of which 
it is impossible to say definitely that they are either French 
or English. No ingenuity has as yet been able to uncoil 
the fabric of certain expressions which at this epoch make 
their appearance. For example : ' He gave five shillings 
to boot ' — what is the origin of this familiar and thoroughly 
English expression to boot .^ We know of a * boot ' or ' bote ' 
which is thoroughly English from the Saxon verb hetan, to 
mend or better a thing. The fishermen of Yarmouth have 
sometimes astonished the learned and curious who have 



84 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

conversed with them, by talking of heati7ig their nets (so it 
sounds) when they mean mending them. In Saxon times 
EOT was the legal and most current word for amends of any 
kind. It passed into ecclesiastical diction in the term d^d- 
BOT, deed-bettering, a word that was replaced in the four- 
teenth century by the term penance. Then bote was *used 
later for material to mend with. It was for centuries, and 
perhaps still is in some parts, a set phrase in leases of land, 
that though the tenant might not fell timber, yet he might 
have wood to mend his plough and make his fire, plow-bote 
and fire-bote. It might appear as if little more need be urged 
for the purpose of shewing that this is also the word in the 
expression ' to boot.' And yet, when we come to examine 
authorities, there is great reason to hesitate before ex- 
cluding the French language from a share in the production 
of this expression. There are two contemporary verbs, 
bouter and boutre, with meanings not widely diverse from 
each other, in the sense of putting to, push, support, prop. 
Hence we have abut, and buttress. And the old gram- 
marian Palsgrave seems to imply this French derivation when 
he says : ' To boote in corsyng [horse-dealing], or chaunging 
one thyng for another, gyue money or some other thynge 
above the thyng. What wyll you boote bytwene my horse 
and yours ? Mettre ou bouter davantaige ^' 

The same kind of uncertainty is continually found to 
haunt words which made their appearance at this epoch. 
A philological writer in the Edinburgh Revieiv has lately 
developed some interesting and rather surprising informa- 
tion concerning the word bottle in Shakspeare and other 
contexts. Among the rest, he has noted the familiar local 
expression a bottle of hay. This he derives without hesita- 

^ Quoted after Mr. Albert Way in Promptorium Parvidorum, p. 45. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 85 

tion from the French, ' botte de foin/ where hotte means a 
lump or mass. But when we consider that in Norfolk 
a bottle of hay is understood to mean the quantity for a 
single feed, it may be doubted whether the derivation from 
bifan, bite, bit, bait, is not at least as probable. The old 
college term battels for the common portions of food goes 
to strengthen this view of the case. 

Some words, whose form is perfectly English to look at, 
are nothing but French v/ords in a Saxon mask. The word 
business has not, as far as I know, been suspected, yet I offer 
it without hesitation as an example. The adjective busy 
existed in Saxon, and although the -ness derivative from it 
is not found, yet it would seem so agreeable to rule , and 
analogy as to pass without challenge. We say good-ness, 
wicked-ness, wily-jtess, worthy-ness, Sec. ; why not busy-ness ? 
And yet the word appears to be nothing but the French 
besogne or, as it was in early times written in the plural, be- 
soingnes. Compare the modern French, Faites voire besogne, 
' Do your duty.' It is possible that the word busy may have 
had that sort of share in the production of the great English 
word business which may be called the ushering of the word. 
When natives seize upon the words of strangers and adopt 
them, their selection is decided in most cases by some 
affinity of sense and sound with a word of their own. A 
very superficial connection will suffice for this, or else we 
could not admit busy even to this inferior share in the pro- 
duction of the word business. For ' a man of business' means, 
and has always meant, something very different from a man 
who is busy. Let us hear an independent and competent 
witness on the signification of this, which is now one of the 
most characteristic words of our nation : — 

' The dictionary definition of Business shows how large 
a part of practical life arranges itself under this head. It is 



^85 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

'' Employment ; an affair ; serious engagement ; something 
to be transacted ; something required to be done." Every 
human being has duties to be performed, and therefore has 
need of cultivating the capacity of doing them ; whether the 
sphere is the management of a household, the conduct of a 
trade or profession, or the government of a nation. Attention, 
application, accuracy, method, punctuality, and dispatch, are 
the principal qualities required for the efficient conduct of 
business of any sort/ — Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, chap. viii. 

So that the use of this word to the present day corre- 
sponds truly to that of the French word besogne, in which 
it originated. 

Bourne, a stream, has been commingled with the French 
borne, a boundary, though it is possible that in this case the 
• line of severance has not been obliterated. These are 
generally regarded as one word, in proof of which may be 
cited the words of Mr. Barnes in a recent lecture : — 'Bourne, 
whence Bournemouth takes its name, signified a spring of 
water, or running stream ; and, as such streams were often 
taken as the divisions between adjoining properties, bourne 
hence came to mean a boundary or limit.' The two words 
of which we have here at least an apparent if not a real 
confluence, are, on the one hand, Gothic brunna, German 
brunnen, Dutch b?'oit, Scottish bur?i. On the other hand, 
the old French bonne, bonnier, bonage (in mediaeval Latin 
bonna, bonarium, bonagiuni), is represented in modern French 
by borne, a limit, boundary. In the English word bourne 
the French sense of limit seems to dominate over the native 
word, meaning stream, so much as to render it doubtful 
whether the latter has any share in the making of the word. 
We have bourne, a stream, in provincial use in Wiltshire, 
and it enters into local names, as Bournemouth — or rather, 
if we speak strictly, it constitutes the local name of Bourne ; 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 87 

for ^Bournemouth' is not the local name, but an invention of 
visitors. But whether we have in literature bourne, a stream, 
at all, is open to doubt — a doubt which affects the value 
of the conjectural reading in King Lear, act iii. sc. 6 : 

' Come o'er the bourn, Bessy, to me,' 

In our elder Psalter, the sweetest monument of lyrical 
English prose, we have the rather uncouth expression, 
making mouths at me. Who would doubt that this is a piece 
of that rustic homespun EngHsh to which this Psalter is so 
largely indebted for its peculiar grace and beauty. And yet 
when we come to look into it, we cannot trace a pure Saxon 
pedigree for the expression. It is the French expression, 
faire la moue, to make a wry face; still good French, as 
recognised by the Academy. Cotgrave (161 1) gives the word 
thus : ' MouE : f. A moe, or 7nouth ; an ill-favoured extension 
or thrusting out of the lips, Oncques vieil Singe ne fit belle 
moue : Prov. An old-hred clowne ivas neuer manner lie J 

Our version of the New Testament offers a familiar 
example of the process of blending the two languages. 
The well-known author of English Past and Present has 
pointed out (p. 198) that in i Tim. ii. 9 it ought to be, 
not 'broidered hair,' but as the Bible of 1611 has it, hroided. 
It means plaited, as the margin signifies ^. In fact the words 
to braid or plait, and to broider with decorative needlework, 
would seem to have been clear enough of each other, to run 
no risk of confusion. Yet they have been confused from 
the inveterate habit of blending Saxon and French roots in 
modern English. The very form broid is an infected form. 
The Saxon for 'to plait' is bredan, and the French for to 
embroider is broder. The commingling of these has pro- 

^ Wiclif (1380) has it, not in writhun heeris ; Tyndale (1534) and his 
followers, not with broyded heare ; the Rheims version (1582) not in plaited 
heare ; and the authorized version of 161 1 not with braided haire. 



88 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

duced 'broidered hair.' In other parts of our version 
hroidered appears in due place, as may be seen by reference 
to that admirable little work, The Bible Word-Book, by 
J. Eastwood and W. Aldis Wright. 

The example of broided from bredan reminds us that the 
modern diphthongs are largely the result of the French in- 
fluence. They are totally different (except perhaps in the 
case of ed) from the Saxon diphthongs. The Saxon sol 
borrows from the French noun souil and verb souiller a new 
vocalisation, and hence the English soil. Reprisals are 
made by the attraction of the Saxon vowels, and we see the 
French deuil producing such an English form as dole, dole/ul. 

The Saxon u is transformed into the French ou as in 
iung, young ; pruh, trough : or the o and u stand apart in 
the modern word, as when tunge becomes tongue. 

One of the most remarkable changes which took place in 
the transition from Saxon to English was the extinction of 
the guttural sound of the Saxon h, which still survives in 
the North of England. This can hardly be accounted for 
in any other way than by the French influence. 

A change of inferior philological significance, but more 
striking to the eye of the modern observer, was that change 
which made English a sibilant language. At present the 
sibilancy of English is a European proverb. The Saxon 
speech had not this mark. 

Of the two main divisions of the Gothic tongue, the Saxon 
belonged to the less sibilant side. This may be seen by 
reference to the tables above, pp. 9, 10. It was entirely 
owing to the French contact, that our language became 
markedly sibilant. Besides our old sibilations, which were 
within average proportions, we accepted all those of the 
French, which were many. And the French language is an 
eminently sibilant language now, to the eye, though not to 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 89 

the ear. It is by the silence of the final s that our old neigh- 
bour is in a position to smile at the susurration of the English 
language. Apart from the French influence, we were less 
sibilant than either French or German. 

It would carry us further than space permits if we at- 
tempted to develop the evidence of the fact that the French 
language has not only left indelible traces on the English, 
but has imparted to it some of its leading characteristics. 
Almost every chapter of the present work will contribute its 
part towards this evidence : and the few observations which 
are collected in this place are mostly of such matters as do 
not appear to claim notice elsewhere. 

It must be admitted, that there are many English words 
of which the derivation cannot be clearly specified, owing 
to the intimate blending of the French and English lan- 
guages at the time when such words were stamped with 
their present form and signification. This blending has, 
moreover, penetrated deeper than to the causing of a little 
etymological perplexity. It has modified the vocalisation 
and even softened the obstinacy of the consonants. 

And the focus of this blending was the court. The 
court was the centre which was the point of meeting for 
the two nationalities, though it hardly knew of any literature 
but the French. The court also was the seminary that 
produced our first national poet. This added greatly to 
the natural advantages which a court possesses for making 
its fashion of speech pass current through the nation. Sup- 
posing — and the supposition is not an unreasonable one — 
that in the struggles of the thirteenth century a great poet 
had risen among the popular and country party, the com- 
plexion of the English language would in all likelihood have 
been far different from what it now is. Such a poet, whether 
he were or were not of courtly breeding, would naturally 



90 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

have selected the phraseology of the country and have 
avoided that of the court. And be it remembered, the 
language of the country was at that time quite as fit for 
a poet's use, as was that of the court. It is not at all a 
necessary thing that the form of a nation's language should 
be dictated from the highest places of the land. The 
Tuscan form of modern Italian was decided by the poetry 
of Dante, at a time when Florence and Tuscany lay in 
comparative obscurity; and when more apparent influence 
was exercised by Venice, or Naples, or Sicily. But in our 
country it did so happen that the first author whose works 
gained universal and national acceptance was a courtier. 
And this is the great thing to be attended to in the history 
of the English language. For its whole nature is a monu- 
ment of the great historical fact that a French court had 
been planted in an English land. The landsfolk tried to 
learn some French, and the court had need to know some 
English ; and the language that was at length developed 
expresses the tenacity of either side and the compromise 
of the two. This unconscious unstudied compromise 
gradually worked itself out at the royal court ; and the result 
was that form of speech which became generally recognised 
and respected as the King's EngUsh. 

In the northern part of the island another centre was 
established at the royal court of Scotland. Here we may 
mark the centralising effect of a seat of government upon 
a national language. The original dialect of the south of 
Scotland was the same with that of the northern counties 
of England, at least as far south as the Trent. This was 
the great ' Anglian ' region. The student of language may 
still observe great traces of affinity between the idioms to 
the north and those on the south of the Scottish border. 
Peculiar words, such as dai'rn, domty, are among the more 



I 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 9 1 

superficial points of similarity. But we will select one that 
is more deeply bedded in the thought of the language. 
There is in Yorkshire, and perhaps over the north of 
England generally, a use of the conjunction while which 
is very different from that of Queen's English. In the 
latter speech while is equivalent to during, but in the 
northern dialects it means until. A Yorkshireman will tell 
his boy : ' You stay here while I return.' 

If we look into the early Scottish Hterature we find that 
this use of while is the established one. Thus Dunbar : — 

' Be divers wayis and operatiouns 
Men maks in court their solistatiouns. 
Sum be service and diligence ; 
Sum be continual residence ; 
On substance sum men dois abyde, 
Quhill fortoun do for them provide,' 

That is, ' Some men live on their own means while ( = until) 
fortune provides for them.' The same poet has ' quhill 
domisday ' for ' until doomsday.' Through the influence 
of the southern literature, even so early as Dunbar, who was 
a great admirer of Chaucer, we find the word also used in 
the Enghsh manner. But the other usage continued for 
a long time to make a feature in Scottish literature \ 

^ In Gawin Douglas's Translation of the Aeneid we have quhil as the 
representative o[ prius qiiam, vi. 327 : 

' Nee ripas datur horrendas et rauca fluenta 
Transportare prius, quam sedibus ossa quierunt. 
Centum errant annos, volitantque haec litora circum : 
Turn demum admissi stagna exoptata revisunt.' 
' It is not til him leful, he ne may 
Thame ferry ouer thir rowtand fiudis gray. 
Nor to the hidduous yonder coistis have, 
Qubil thare banis be laid to rest in grave. 
Quha ar unberyit ane hundreth yere mon bide 
Waverand and wandrand by this bankis syde. 
Than at the last to pas ouer in this bote 
Thay bene admittit, and coistis thaym not ane grote.' 



92 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

The following examples are from Buchanan's version of 
the famous letters of Queen Mary, reprinted by Hugh 
Campbell, 1824 : — 

' You left somebody this day in sadness, that will never be merry while 
he see you again.' 

' I wrought this day while it was two hours upon this bracelet* (i.e. till 
it was two o'clock). 

' He prayed me to remain with him while another morning.' 

' Which was the occasion that while dinner time I held purpose to nobody ' 
(i.e. that until dinner time I conversed with nobody). 

In Shakspeare, where we find almost everything, we also 
discover this usage. But it is (whether purposely or not) 
in the mouth of a Scotchman : 

' While then, God be with you.' Macbeth, iii. I. 43. 

Pope corrected this reading, and changed the while to ////. 

This use of the conjunction while in the sense of until 
was attended with one advantage which the Queen's English 
has never shared. The genitival form whilst has never been 
with us anything more than a fanciful variety of expression : 
it has not enjoyed a distinct signification from while. But 
in the northern literature this genitival form came in to fill 
up the void that was left by while meaning until, and we 
find whilst standing for during. Thus in the Cursor Mundi 
(about 1320) we read: ' Bot quils ])ai slepand lai in bedd/ 
That is, ' But whilst they sleeping lay in bed.' 

This peculiarity of the conjunction while may serve as an 
indication that the dialects of our northern counties were 
anciently united in one and the same state-language with 
that which we now call Scottish. The partial alienation 
which has since taken place, has been due to the division 
of that which was once an integral territory, consequent 
upon the establishment of a northern and a southern court 
in this island. The old uniformity and identity has been 
greatly impaired, and the political border has long since 



I 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 93 

become, in great measure, a linguistic border also. On the 
other side of that border is a rustic dialect and a national 
literature which may picture to our eyes and ears, with some 
approach to probability, what our English language might 
by this time have been, if it had been preserved equally free 
from Romanesque influence. In our own southern land, the 
growth and expansion of the King's English has so preyed 
upon the vitals of the Saxon dialects which constitute in fact 
the mould and the soil out of which the King's English has 
grown robust, that nothing but a few poor relics are left to 
them of their own, and it is no longer possible to institute 
a comparison between them and the national speech. When, 
in a season of unusual heat, the potato crop has ripened in 
the middle of the summer, and produced a second generation 
of tubers, the new potatoes and the old cling to the same 
haulm, but those of later growth have left the earlier crop 
effete and worthless. Even so it is with the dialects — all 
their goodness is gone into the King's English, but still their 
old forms are venerable and interesting. Such power and 
beauty as they still possess they cannot get credit for carent 
quia vate sacro, because they want a poet to present them 
at their full advantage. Where, in some remoter county 
a poet has appeared to adorn his local dialect, we find our- 
selves surprised at the effect produced out of materials that 
we might else have deemed contemptible. A splendid 
example of this is furnished by the poems of Mr. Barnes 
in the Dorset dialect. Unless a southern fondness misleads 
us, he has affiliated to our language a second Doric, and 
won a more than alliterative right to be quoted along with 
Burns. 

The great characteristic which distinguishes all the dialects 
from King's English is this : That they are comparatively 
unaltered by French influence. And though the Scottish 



94 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

Anglian has accepted a vast quantity of French words, this 
is but a superficial matter. The language has not shared 
in those deeper French influences which have so coloured 
our English. While the national and standard English is 
more steeped and dyed in French than is generally allowed, 
the Scottish and the provincial English have had a different 
history, and they owe less to French than is often sup- 
posed. In Scottish and provincial glossaries there is too 
great a readiness to trace words back to French sources. 
The French origin of a certain number of words which all 
classes of either nation use in common, is as certain as 
that veal, mutton, beef, pork, and butcher are French words. 
But when a great provincial word like the adjective bonny or 
honnie is referred to the French adjective for good, masculine 
bon, feminine bonne, an example is seen of over-proneness 
to French derivations. This word is in popular use from 
the Fens to the Highlands, and widely spread over the cen- 
tral parts of the island. It occurs in Shakspeare, and is 
familiarly known in the old ballads and romances ^ Yet it 
is not strictly of our national English at the present time, 
if indeed it was at any time. It has never been thoroughly 
accepted in literature and in polite intercourse in this 
country in the same way in which it has been accepted .in 
Scotland. In many counties it is a very familiar sound, 
especially in Yorkshire. But it is a provincialism every- 
where south of the Tweed. It is in all our dictionaries 
derived from the French. Richardson, Webster, and the 
last improvement in etymological dictionaries, namely, 
Dr. Latham's edition of Johnson, agree in referring it to 
Ion, bonne. This being the case, I will expand the reasons 



^ For an excellent list of illustratii^ns of the use of this word, see Mr. 
Atkinson's Glossary of the Cleveland Dialed, v. Bonny. 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 95 

which to me seem conclusive against this derivation. The 
word seems never to have borne the sense of good. If it 
had, that sense or something like it would have lingered 
somewhere. But its sense is one and the same everywhere, 
north and south. It is that of being joyous, smart, gay, 
fair to look upon, equally in the person and in the attire. 
This uniformity of sense over a wide area is evidence that 
the word has not altered much in sense since its distribution 
over that area. This sort of argument is not applicable 
to a national expression ; but to a provincial one it is. The 
reason of this difference is obvious. Where there is a 
central literature, there is a constant provision for the main- , 
tenance of uniformity, even though words are changing their 
sense. But if a word is used by dispersed groups of people, 
and that word undergoes change of sense, such change will 
not be uniform ; for there is no common standard of 
uniformity. The uniformity then which holds in the use 
of honnie is, to say the least, a strong ground of presump- 
tion that the sense is a well-preserved sense and, so to 
say, the original sense of that word. It is true we have no 
surviving instance of the Saxon honig, but it may be reason- 
ably surmised that the word was already in Saxon times 
spread just as it is now, only in the form of honig. We have 
the substantive which would naturally form such an adjective. 
Not the gay attire of a damsel of romance, but something 
which by analogy may be compared, is called in Saxon 
hone ; to be pronounced as two syllables. The rings and 
chains and barbaric trappings which adorned the figure- 
heads of the ships of the eleventh century are called in one 
of the Saxon chronicles hone ; and this is translated by 
Florence of Worcester with the Latin ornatura, ornament, 
decoration. Leofric, the first Bishop of Exeter, gave to 
his cathedral many ornamented objects, and they are all 



96 SKETCH OF THE RISE 

described in his memorandum, which is extant, as gehonede 
ox y-bonm'e-d. Roods, books, shrines, candlesticks, and other 
objects, are described as geboned, which seems here to imply 
fine ornamented decoration, probably goldsmith's and silver- 
smith's work. Here, then, is a sufficient root for the deriva- 
tion of our honnie, and one which will far better satisfy the 
requirements of the case. If we look into the cognate lan- 
guages out of England, we find in Platt-Deutsch the verb 
bonen for the rubbing and polishing up of cabinet furniture. 
The Danish verb bone means the same thing. So does the 
Swedish verb bona. 

But it is not by wresting a few native words from the 
French category that we are to succeed in establishing the 
comparative ' purity ' of the Scottish- Anglian and of our 
provincial dialects, as compared with the Queen's English. 
The real characterising distinction of the latter is not that 
it took in more French words, or even that it blended French 
and English features together till they were undistinguish- 
able in many words ; but, that the sound, the rhythm, the 
modulation, the music of the language was one entirely new. 
Every Englishman knows that it is comparatively easy to 
understand the dialects in print, but often quite impossible 
in conversation. The main cause of this is the unfamiliar 
rhythm. The English language is one which has from long 
mixture with the French obtained not indeed the French 
intonation, but a new one of its own ; and herein will pro- 
bably be found to lie the essential characteristic which sets 
our English apart from its old relatives as a new and distinct 
variety of the old Gothic stock, and one from which the 
world may see a new strain and family of languages ulti- 
mately engendered. To this result a long train of conditions 
contributed ; and we are able in some measure to trace the 
causes from the time when the Roman colonisation infected 



OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 97 ■ 

the Keltic speech of the island, and prepared the mould into • 

which the Saxon immigration was to be received. But all j 

other causes recede, into insignificance, compared with the ] 

long rule of French-speaking masters in this island. If we i 

want to describe the transition from the Saxon state-language 1 

of the eleventh century to the Court-English of the four- \ 

teenth, and to reduce the description to its simplest terms, ' 
it comes in fact just to this : That a French family settled 
in England, and edited the English language. 



CHAPTER I. 

ON THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

Alphabetic writing appears to have been an outgrowth 
of that picture-writing which is still in use among savages. 
At first the writing was altogether pictorial — that is to say, 
the thing pictured was the thing meant. 

Next, the thing pictured stood for the sound of its name, 
wherever that sound was required, whether to speak of that 
very thing or of some other thing with like-sounding name. 
This is the state of Chinese writing. It is as if (to adopt 
Mr. Tylor's illustration) a drawing of a pear were made 
to do duty for the words pare^ pear, and pair, with signs to 
guide the reader which sense he was to attach to the sound. 
This may be called the syllabic stage. 

The third stage is where each figure represents only 
a consonant or a vowel, which we call the alphabetic system. 
Some national systems of writing have failed to arrive 
at this, and , have remained stationary midway. Others, 
as the hieroglyphic, having gone through all the stages, 
seem to continue to be a mixture of all, not having become 
purely alphabetic. 

H 2 



100 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

Purely alphabetic as modern European writing is, there 
are still some slight traces of the pictorial origin of writing 
which remain in use among us. The first four Roman 
numerals, I, II, III, IIII, for instance, are pictorial of that 
which is alphabetically expressed by the words one, two, 
three, 2iXid four. We may imagine that they represent so 
many fingers, or sticks, or notches, or strokes. It has been 
also supposed that the numeral V may have originated in 
a rude drawing of the open hand with the thumb stretched 
out and the fingers close together. Again, when we read 
in our almanacs ' before clock 4 min.' and ' ]) rises at 
8h. 35min.' we have before us a mixture of the pictorial 
and the alphabetical, the most elementary and the most 
consummate methods of writing. 

Our nation, in common with the other nations of western 
Europe, has adopted the Roman alphabet. This change 
began in the latter end of the sixth century, but it was not 
completed at a single step. 

This alphabet was introduced into our island from two 
opposite quarters, from the north-west by the Irish mis- 
sionaries, and from the south-east by the Roman missionaries. 
It is to be remembered that when our Saxon ancestors were 
pagans and barbarians. Christian life and culture had already 
taken so deep a hold of Ireland that she sent forth mis- 
sions to instruct and convert her neighbours. Their books 
were written with the Roman alphabet, which they must 
have possessed from an early date, and to which they had 
already imparted a distinct Hibernian physiognomy. Of the 
two denominations of missionaries which thus from opposite 
quarters entered our island, one gained the ecclesiastical 
pre-eminence ; but the other for a long time furnished the 
schoolmasters. 

Hence it was that certain insular characteristics were 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. lOI 

retained for centuries, and the Anglo-Saxon writing was 
after the Irish and not after the Roman model. 

But another style of alphabetic writing had been in use 
among our Saxon ancestors from time immemorial — one 
that was not quickly to be superseded by clerkly penman- 
ship, whether Irish or Roman. This was the Runic, 
a system of writing which had existed among the Gothic 
nations from an unknown antiquity. 

The name Runic was so called from the term which was 
used by our barbarian ancestors to designate the mysterious 
letters of the alphabet. This was Run (singular), Rune 
(plural), and also Run-stafas, Rime-staves, or, as we should 
now speak, Runic characters. This word Run signified 
mystery or secret ; and a verb of this root was in use down 
to a comparatively recent date in English literature, as an 
equivalent for the verb to whisper. In a ' Moral Ode ' of 
the thirteenth century it is said of the Omniscient, — 

'Elche rune he ihurS & he wot alle dede 
He J)ur-sihS elches mannes ])anc, ])at seal us to rede.' 

Each whisper he hears, and he knows all deeds. 

He sees through each man's thought, that shall us judge. 

In Chaucer's Friars Tale (7132) the Sompnour is described 
as drawing near to his travelling companion, 
' Ful prively, and rouned in his ere ' ; 

i.e. quite confidentially, and whispered in his ear. It was 

also much used in the mediaeval ballads for the chattering 

and chirping of birds, as being unintelligible and mysterious 

(except to a few who were wiser than their neighbours), 

as — 

' Lenten ys come with love to toune. 
With blosmen and with briddes rouned 

It was used also of any kind of discourse; but mostly 



lOa THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

of private or privileged communication in council or in 
conference : 

' The steward on knees him set adown, 
With the emperor for to rown.' 
Richard Coer de Lion, 2142 (in Weber's Metrical Romances). 

This rown became rownd and round, on the principle of 
N attracting a d to follow it; see below, p. in. As in The 
Faery Queene, iii. 10. 30: — 

' But Trompart, that his Maistres humor knew 
In lofty looks to hide an humble minde, 
Was inly tickled with that golden vew, 
And in his eare him rownded close behinde.' 

In the following passage from Shakspeare, The WtJiiers 
Tale, i. 2. 217, the editor Hanmer proposed as a correc- 
tion, whisp'ring round : — 

'They're here with me already; whisp'ring, rounding.' 

Thus the word Run had a progeny something like that of 
the Latin word litter ce; whence ' letter,' ' letters' ( = learning), 
' literature,' * literary.' 

. The Runes were in fact a short alphabet of sixteen letters 
only. They were shapen differently from the Roman cha- 
racters, being almost free from curved or wavy Hnes, and 
a mere composition of right lines at various inclinations and 
elevations relatively to each other. It is not easy to present 
a pure and original Runic alphabet because of the early 
influence of the Roman alphabet upon it. There was also 
a certain tendency to mix up signs for whole words with 
signs for letter-sounds, so that a doubt is thrown over the 
nature of some of the characters. 

The Runic literature is mostly carved on stones, arrows, 
axes, knife-handles, swords and sword-hilts, clasps, spear- 
heads, pigs of metal, amulets, rings, bracelets, brooches, 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. I03 

combs, horns, bracteates, coffins, bells, fonts, clog-almanacks 
— and very little in books. The elder specimens have 
been collected and illustrated by Professor George Ste- 
phens, of Copenhagen. Runic inscriptions are chiefly 
found in the northern and western extremes of Europe, 
the parts which were never visited by Roman armies, 
or where (as in this country) great immigrations took 
place after the Romans had retired. There are Scan- 
dinavian Runes, and English Runes, and German Runes. 
These have some differences between them, but they agree 
in the main features. It is by comparing these together, 
and eliminating their differences, that we determine which 
were the original sixteen characters ^. 

They appear to have been the following : — 

^ h \> ^ R < 

F U TH O R K 

H 1^ I ^ H 

H N I korM S 

T B L M Y 

Others were perhaps added later, as — 

h M ?< r( + i> Y 

C E G P Q W A 

Yet this distinction of the Runes into elder and younger 
has been called into question. Professor Stephens with 

^ In the history of the Runic alphabet I have chiefly followed Wilhelm 
Grimm's Ueber Deutsche Riinen, 182 1. Since the text was in the printer's 
hands 1 have learnt from the second volume of Professor Stephens's Rufiic 
Monuments, 1 868, that these views are open to question in many respects. 
In deference to the latter authority I have altered the value of |^ and of ^. 



I04 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

great force maintains that the oldest Runic alphabet was 
the most various and multiplex. 

When our Saxon ancestors adopted the use of the Latin 
alphabet, they still retained even in book literature two of 
the Runes, because there were no Roman characters corres- 
ponding to them. One was the old Thorn, p, for which the 
Latin mode of expression was by the use of two letters TH, 
and the other was the more local p which was after the 
conquest superseded by a double U or double V. 

The p (TH) had a more prolonged career. A modified 
Roman letter was put forward as a substitute for it, namely 
a crossed D, but the character thus excogitated (D ^) did 
not supersede the Rune p, which continued to be used along 
with it in a confused and arbitrary manner, until they were 
both ultimately banished by the general adoption of the TH. 
This change was not completely established until the very 
close of the fifteenth century. And even then there was 
one case of the use of the Rune p which was not abolished. 
The words the and that continued to be written J>e and J?at 
or J?\ This habit lasted on long after its original meaning 
was forgotten. The p got confused with the character y 
at a time when the y was closed a-top, and then people 
wrote ' ye ' for the and ' y* ' for that. This has lasted down 
close to our own times : and it may be doubted whether the 
practice has entirely ceased even now. 

Ben Jonson, in The English Gramjnar, considered that by 
the loss of the Saxon letters ]? and ^ we had fallen into what 
he called 'the greatest difficulty of our alphabet and true 
writing,' inasmuch as we had lost the means of distin- 
guishing the two sounds of th, as in this, that, them, thine, 
from the sound of the same character in thi7ig, thick, thread, 
thrive. 

As a means of distinguishing these two sounds the letters 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. I05 

\ and ^ might have been highly serviceable. But there is 
no evidence that they were ever used with this discrimination 
in Saxon literature, or at any later period. 

When, in the sixth century, the Latin alphabet began to 
obtain the ascendancy over the native Runes, the Runes did 
not at once fall into disuse. Runes are found on grave- 
stones, church crosses, fibulae, &c, down at least to the 
eleventh century. The Isle of Man is famous for its Runic 
stones, especially the church of Kirk Braddan. These are 
Scandinavian, and are due to the Norwegian settlements of 
the tenth century. For lapidary inscriptions, clog almanacs^ 
and other familiar uses, it is difficult to say how long they 
may have lingered in remote localities. In such lurking- 
places a new kind of importance and of mystery came to be 
attached to them. They were held in a sort of traditional 
respect which at length grew into a superstition. They 
were the heathen way of writing, while the Latin alphabet 
was a symbol of Christianity. The Danish pirates used Runes 
at the time when they harried the Christian nations. There 
is a marble lion in Venice, on which is a Runic inscription, 
which commemorates a visit of one of the northern sea- 
rovers at Athens (where the lion then was) in the tenth 
century. After a time, they came to be regarded as positive 
tokens of heathendom, and to belong only to sorcery and 
magic. 

We now pass to consider the Roman alphabet, and to 
note some of the peculiarities of its use among ourselves. 
And first, of our vowels, and the remarkable names by 
which we are wont to designate them. Our names of 
the vowels are singularly at variance with the continental 
names for the same characters. Of the five vowels a e i u, 
there is but one, viz. 0, of which the name is at all like that 
given it in France or Germany. But it is in the names of 



I05 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

A and / and U that our insular tendencies have wrought 
their most pronounced effects. The first we call by an 
unwriteable name, and which we cannot more nearly describe 
than by saying, that it is the sound which drops out of the 
half-open mouth, with the lowest degree of effort at utter- 
ance. It is a diphthongal sound, and if we must spell it, it is 
this : Ae. This ^ is a curiosity of the English language, 
and will call for further notice by-and-bye. The character 
/we C2\\ eye or igh ; the ^we calljyezv. 

That / was called eye in Shakspeare's time, seems 
indicated by that line in Midsummer Nighfs Dream, iii. 2. 
188:— 

* Fair Helena ; who more engilds the night. 
Then all yon fierie oes and eies of light.' 

Where it seems plain that the stars are called O's and I's. 

If this passage left it doubtful whether the letter / were 
sounded in Shakspeare's time as it is now, there is a passage 
in Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2 which removes the doubt : — 

'Hath Romeo slaine himselfe? say thou but I, 
And that bare vowele I shall poyson more 
Than the death-darting eye of Cockatrice : 
I am not I, if there be such an I ; 
Or those eyes shot, that makes thee answere 7. 
If he be slaine say I; or if not, no: 
Briefe sounds determine of my weale or wo.' 

Here it is plain that the affirmative which we now write ay, 
and the noun eye, and the vowel /, are regarded as having 
the selfsame sound. 

The extreme oddity of our sound of U comes out under 
a used-up or languid utterance, as when a dilettante is 
heard to excuse himself from purchasing pictures which are 
offered to him at a great bargain, on the plea that ' they do 
ac-cyew-myew-layte [accumulate] so ! ' In France this letter 
has the narrow sound which is unknown in English, but 



I 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. lOj 

which it has in Welsh, and which seems ever ready to 
degenerate into Y: in Germany it has the broad sound 
oi 00. 

As the sound of u has developed into the 'yew' sound, so 
it is quite as much in the nature of i to grow into a kind 
of ' yigh ' sound, as may sometimes be heard in affected or 
exaggerated pronunciation. The following extract from 
a ' Prologue ' by the American humourist Oliver Wendell 
Holmes will shew what is meant : — 

' " The world 's a stage," — as Shakspeare said, one day ; 
The stage a world — was what he meant to say. 
The outside world 's a blunder, that is clear ; 
The real world that Nature meant is here. 
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma ; 
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa ; 
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid. 
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid ; 
One after one the troubles all are past 
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last. 
When the young couple, old folks, rogues and all. 
Join hands, so happy at the curtain's fall. 
— Here suffering virtue ever finds relief, 
And black-brow'd ruffians always come to grief. 
■ — When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech, 
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach, 
Cries, " Help, hyind Heaven ! " and drops upon her knees 
On the green — baize, — beneath the (canvas) trees, — 
See to her side avenging Valour fly : — 
" Ha ! Villain ! Draw ! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die ! " ' 

But with reference to these strange insular names of our 
vowels, there is an observation to be made, which has, 
I think, been overlooked. The names of the five vowels 
are, Ae, Ee, Igh, Oe, Yeiv ; but these names, which are 
distinctly our own, and among the peculiarities of our 
language, do not in the case of any single vowel express 
the prevalent sound of that vowel in practical use. The 
chief sound of our A is that which it has in at, bat, cat, 
dagger, fat, gander, hat, land, man, nap, pan, rat, sat, vat, 
want. It has another very distinct sound, especially before 



I08 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

the letter L, namely the sound of aw : as, all, ball, call, fall, 
gall, hall, malt, pall, tall, talk, wall, walk, water. But the 
sound which is expressed in the name Ae is a diphthongal 
sound, which A never bears in any word except when to 
the « an ^ is appended, not immediately indeed, but after 
an intervening consonant: as, ate, bate, cate, date, fate, gape, 
hate, jape, late, make, nape, pane, rate, state, tale, vale, wane. 
This final e must be considered as much embodied with 
its a, as in the corresponding German sound d which is 
in fact only a brief way of writing ae. It is difficult to 
suppose that the name of our first vowel has been dictated 
by the sound which it bears in the last-mentioned list of 
instances. There is no apparent reason why that class of 
instances should have drawn to itself any such special 
attention, to the neglect of the instances which more truly 
exemplify the power of the vowel. But there is one par- 
ticular instance of the use of A which is sufficiently frequent 
and conspicuous to have determined the naming of the 
letter. I can only suppose that the name which the letter 
bears has been adopted from the ordinary way in which the 
indefinite article A is pronounced. 

The vowel E in like manner does not generally represent 
the sound Ee which its name indicates. It only does so, as 
a rule, when supported by another e after an intervening 
consonant. Examples : bere, cere, intercede, intervene. 

We are therefore driven to look for some familiar and 
oft-recurring words, which have the e exceptionally pro- 
nounced as Ee. And such we find in the personal pro- 
nouns. The words he, she, me, we, have all the e long, and 
if they were spelt according to their sound, they would 
appear as hee, shee, mee, wee. In proof of this may be cited 
the case of the pronoun thee, which is written with its vowel 
double, though it has no innate right in this respect over the 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. IC9 

pronoun me. The double vowel is expressed in the solitary 
instance of thee, as a matter of convenience, and to dis- 
tinguish it readily from the definite article the. It is by 
reference then to the function of the letter e in the personal 
pronouns, that we explain the name of Ee by which that 
vowel is incorrectly designated. 

It may be left to the reader to observe by a collection of 
instances, like hit, bit, nip, wit, dip, fit, sit, &c., &c., that 
the name which we have given to the vowel / does by 
no means give a just report of the general sound of that 
letter in our orthography. In what syllables is that eye 
sound represented by i1 Only in two kinds. The first 
is where it is supported by an e subscript : as, mi7te, wine, 
pipe, bite, kite, &c. The other case is where it has an 
old guttural after it; as, high, night, might, light. Sec. In 
short, the name of Igh does not represent truly the general 
use of this vowel. To account for its having acquired so 
inappropriate a name, we must again seek for a familiar 
and frequent word in which the vowel does bear this sound. 
And we find it in the personal pronoun /, which we might 
have written as Igh with equal propriety, and on the same 
principles as have determined the orthography of right, 
might, &c. The Saxon form was Ic / the German form 
is 3c^, the Dutch Ik, the Danish y^^, and the Swedish yia;^. 
So that in fact the name we have bestowed on / is not 
the due of that vowel in its simplicity, but only of that 
vowel after it has absorbed and assimilated an ancient 
guttural. 

The offers less to remark on than the other vowels. 
Yet even here the name Oe does not represent the sound it 
bears in the simplest instances of its use. It is quite dif- 
ferent from the sound of in do, go, to, dot, top, mop, dog, 
hop, lop, bog, tor. 



no THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

But it is the sound which it has when written diph- 
thongally with e, or with e subscript, as toe, foe, roe, hoe, sloe 
(except shoe) ; or, tone, doge, fore, rope, hope, slope. 

Of the U, it is very obscure what has led to its name. 
The instances where it represents that sound by which we 
have chosen to call it, are comparatively few. The pro- 
nunciation of the u as yew is probably East- Anglian in 
its origin. Natives of that province sometimes bring in 
that sound unexpectedly. When they utter the words rule, 
truth, ferusalem, with energy, they have been observed to 
convert them into ryule, tr-yewih, feryewsalem. This ten- 
dency, whereby the straining of a u generates a y, may be 
compared to the instance at p. 107, where i becomes _>^z*, 
kyind. 

Not Avithout an apparent parallelism is our pronunciation 
of the noun ewe, to which in sound we prefix ajF. 

Account for it how we may, the fact is plain (and this is 
what we are now upon) that the vowel has caught its nam- 
ing from certain strained and exceptional uses of it. 

To so great a length have I pursued this subject of 
the naming of our vowels, because it is in fact a most 
exceptional and insular phenomenon. As a criterion of the 
whole case we might refer to the designations of the five 
vowels in French or German, and the reasonableness of 
those designations. If this were done, the result would be 
something as follows. The French and Germans have 
named the vowels, but the English have nick-named them. 
When a man is called a king or a servant, he is character- 
ised by what may properly be called a name. But if we 
call him Longshanks or Peach-hlossom, we nick-name him. 
And this is analogous to what we have done with the vowels. 
We have given them names which are expressive, not of 
their general functions, but of the impression made by 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. I] I 

some prominent anomaly or adventitious oddity in their 
appearance. 

One or two of the consonants require some special 
remarks. 

C was invested with its present s-like sound by the 
French influence which accompanied the Norman Con- 
quest. Before that time it was never used but with the 
K-sound, which it still has before a, o, and u, as in call, 
cod, cut. 

G in Anglo-Saxon very generally became y in English ; 
daeg, day : ge2ir, year : ge,ye: gityjyel: gv2eg,gray: gQ2io,yare. 

In some cases a reaction ensued. The Anglo-Saxon 
gi/an is in Chaucer toyeve ; but it has had the g restored 
long ago, and we say give. 

Such changes were a source of copiousness to the lan- 
guage, which often retained the old form in some special 
use while adopting the new as a general rule. Thus grcBg 
became gray for general purposes, but as designating a 
grasshopper it became grig. 

D has a great affinity for n, and often is brought into 
a word by the n as a sort of shadow. In the words im- 
pound, expound, from the Latin impono and expono, the 
D is a pure English addition: so likewise in sound from 
French son, Latin sonus. Provincial phonetics go still 
further, and call a gown gownd. See above, p. 102. 

T in like manner is sometimes drawn in by s. In 
Acts xxvii. 40, we read ' hoised up the main-sail,' where we 
should now say and write ' hoisted,' not for any etymological 
reason, but from a purely phonetic cause. 

D has also a disposition to slip in between L and R. 
Thus the Saxon ealra, gen. pi. of eal = all, became first aller 
and then alder, as in ' Mine alder liefest Sovereign/ 2 King 
Henry VI, i. i. 



112 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

H in the ancient language was a guttural This letter 
has undergone more change of value since its introduction 
into our language, than any other letter. It is now a mere 
dumb historical object in many cases, and where it has any 
sound it is merely the sign of aspiration. It is almost classed 
with the vowels, as in the familiar rule which tells us to say 
an before a word beginning with a vowel or a silent h. It 
seems almost incredible that it ever had in English the force 
of the German ch, or rather of the Welsh ch. Yet such was 
the case. 

This ancient guttural is heard now only in those portions 
of the Anglian provinces which are in the southern counties 
of Scotland, and the northern counties of England. There 
you may still hear licht and necht { = light and night) pro- 
nounced in- audible gutturals. In the old English (or 
Anglo-Saxon) these were written with the simple h thus, liht 
and niht, but pronounced gutturally. As we now regard 
c and K as interchangeable in certain cases, e. g. Calendar or 
Kalendar, so in the early time stood c and h to each other. 
There were a certain number of words in which the Anglian 
c (of the time of Baeda) was represented by a Saxon h. The 
word beret, bright, is of frequent occurrence in the Eccle- 
siastical History of the Angles, It occurs in proper names, as 
Bercta, Berctfrid, Berctgils, Bercthun, Berctred, Berctuald, 
Cudberct, Hereberct, Huaetberct. This word was also freely 
used in Saxon names, but in them the Anglian c became h, 
beorhtoY briht: Brihtheim, Brihtno]?, Brihtric, Brihtwold, Briht- 
wulf, Ecgbriht, Cu^briht. This h retained its guttural force 
down to the middle of the fourteenth century, as may be 
shewn from the orthography of that period. For example, 
sixt thou for seest thou, or rather sehest thou, in Piers Plow- 
man i. 5, is evidence that his siht = sight, was gutturally 
pronounced. 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. II3 

As the H began to be more feebly uttered, and it was no 
longer regarded as a sure guttural sign, it had to be rein- 
forced by putting a c before it, as in the above licht and 
necht ; or by a g, as in though (Saxon \eah), daughter 
(Saxon dohter), &c. But the gh had little power to arrest 
the tendency of the language to divest itself of its gut- 
turals, and GH in its turn has grown to be a dumb monu- 
ment of bygone pronunciation. 

J is a character which entered our alphabet in the seven- 
teenth century. The sound of it came into English far 
earlier, by our adoption of French words that had it. Such 
were, j angler, jealous, jest, jewel, join, jolly, journey, joust, joy, 
judge, July, justice. A reflex effect of this our consonantal J 
has been that we have lent it to the Latin language in our 
printed books, and in our pronunciation. Such words as 
maior, peior, iuvare, iam, iuncus, huius, eius. Sec, we have 
printed and pronounced major, pejor, juvare, jam, juncus, 
hujus, ejus, &c. It appears that the Latin never had the J- 
sound ; for how could Italian have escaped without it ? The 
Latin Ego makes in Italian lo, but in French Je, with a con- 
sonantal initial. And this is as much a pure French out- 
growth, as certain cases of initial w and y in English are 
original products of our own. On these grounds it seems 
that we have been wrong in attributing a consonant J to the 
Latin language. The best Latin scholars are now correcting 
this. In Professor Conington's Vergil I do not see a J. As 
a sample of his text I quote the two opening lines of the 
most famous of Eclogues : — 

' Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus ! 
Non omnes arbusta iuvant, humilesque myricae.' 

K is not properly a Latin, but a Greek letter. In Roman 
writing it had a very undefined position as a superfluous 
character, a mere duplicate-variety of c. This was also its 
I 



114 ^-^-^ ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

position through the whole period of Anglo-Saxon literature; 
it was a mere fancy to write k, and it meant nothing dif- 
ferent from the thin c. But very soon after the Conquest, 
the greater frequency of k is observable; and it went on 
increasing just in proportion as the value of c became 
equivocal through its Frenchified employment with the sound 
of s. Already in the twelfth century, k is found to have 
a place and function of its own to the entire exclusion of c, 
namely, before the vowels e and i, the cases in which c had 
gone off into the s-sound. Thus the old words cene, cempa 
( = warrior), Cent, cepan, cyn, cyng, &c., were in the twelfth 
century written constantly as kene ( = keen), kempa ( = cham- 
pion), Kent, keep, kin, king, &c. But when it had to be 
doubled, it was by prefixing c, and not by a repetition 
of K, that the doubhng was effected. Thus, a<:/^nowledge, 
which is only a compound of the particle a with knowledge, 
the c expressing the reverberation of the K-sound. So also 
in lack, crack, Jack, &c., and the old-fashioned spellings of 
politick, cBsthetick, &c., ck may be taken as equivalent to kk. 
P is a letter that was not so much used in Old English 
as in some kindred dialects. Our Saxon ancestors seem to 
have had a repugnance to it as an initial letter of words. In 
Kemble's Glossary to the Saxon epic poem called Beowulf, 
he has given only three words under the letter p ; and in 
Bouterwek's Glossary to Ccsdmon there are only two, both 
of which are comprised in the former three. Thus, two 
Glossaries of our two oldest national poems exhibit only 
three words beginning with p. One of the three is now 
extinct : but the other two are quite familiar to us ; they are 
J)ath and play. These were, in the eighth century, ex- 
ceptional words in English, from the fact that they began 
with p. And to this day it may still be asserted that almost all 
the English words beginning with p are of foreign extraction. 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 1]5 

Q is a Latin letter, which was not recognised in English 
till the close of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth 
century. Previous to this the Anglo-Saxon writers had 
done very well without it ; having expressed the sound of 
qu by the letters cw : examples — cwahn (qualm, pestilence, 
death), cwce^ (quoth), cwen (queen), cwic (quick), &c. At 
first the qu was only admitted in writing Latin or French 
words, while cw kept its place in native words. Among the 
earliest Latin or French words beginning with qu which 
were adopted in English are quart, quarter, quarterne ( = a 
prison), quarrel, quarry, quire, quit (from quietus, quiet). 
This is the position which Q holds at this day in the Dutch 
language ; it is used for spelling certain Latin words, while 
kw is used for the same sound in the words of native origin. 
In English, on the contrary, the qu very soon prevailed even 
in the home-born words ; and before the close of the thir- 
teenth century we find quake, qualm, quash, queen, quell, quick, 
besides some other less common words. The name which 
we give the letter is said to be the French queue, a tail (Q). 

V. A Latin letter that came in soon after the Conquest, 
with the French words virtue, visage, vaine, veray, venerie. 

W. It has already been said that before the Conquest the 
character w was little used. Where the Anglo-Saxon printed 
books have it, the manuscripts have the old Rune p. But after 
the Conquest, when a great many Romance words beginning 
with V were coming into the English, and a distinction had 
to be made between this sound and that of the old p, it was 
effected by a double v. But it must carefully be observed 
that the novelty as regards the w was only in the character 
and not in the sound. The sound of w has long been in the 
language, having been embodied with it when the Wessex 
speech first assumed shape as a distinct Saxon dialect. It 
is now one of the chief characteristics of our language 

I 2 



Ij6 the ENGLISH ALPHABET, 

among the other members of its family; and it must be 
attributed to that intimate mingling with the British Kelts in 
the fifth and sixth centuries of which history has left us such 
unmistakeable traces. As an initial, it is emphatically a pro- 
duct of the West, and would hardly have existed, had our 
language been educated in the Eastern Counties. The sound 
of the w may be described as a consonantism resulting from 
the collision of two vocalic sounds, viz. oo and ee. Say oo 
first, and then say ee : if you keep an interval between, the 
vocalic nature of each is preserved, but if you pass quickly 
from the utterance of oo to that of ee, you engender the con- 
sonantal sound w, and produce the word we. And in fact, 
almost any two vowels coming into such collision will en- 
gender the w. This seems to be the cause of the w in 
oferscBWisca, the Saxon translation oi transmarinus, = one from 
beyond sea. The parts are ofer (beyond), scb (sea), and 
the adjectival termination -isc, from which our modern -ish. 
The w is the consonantal partition between scb and isc, and 
it seems to spring out of the vocalic collision itself It is 
said in Grammars that w (like v) is a consonant when it 
is initial, either of a v/ord or syllable ; and a vowel elsewhere. 
According to this rule (which fairly states the case) we find 
that w is a vowel now, where once it was a consonant. 
Take the wordy^w, in which w has now only a vocalic 
sound ; this word was once a disyllabic y^(22x;^, and then the 
second syllable wa gave the w a consonantal value. 

X has two powers, one its original value, ks ; and the other 
gs, a development common to English and French. It sounds 
as gs when the syllable following the x is accented, as ex- 
haust, exalt, exotic^ extend ; but in other cases with its simple 
and original value of ks. A crucial example is the word export, 
which has the accent on the first as a noun, and on the last 
as a verb. We say ' to expdrt ' with the pronunciation egsport : 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. II7 

but we speak of ' exports ' or ' export-duties ' with the pro- 
nunciation ^ksport. This distinction is, however, open to 
question ; and the decision of it is all the more difficult, as 
we may not trust the report of our own organs in delicate 
points of pronunciation. Our utterance is warped the mo- 
ment we set ourselves to observe and examine it. It is 
sufficient for this place to have indicated the existence of 
two sounds of the X. 

Y is an ancient Greek letter adopted by the Romans, and 
used in Saxon writing as a fine thin vowel (like French 
u or German it) apt to be confused with i. The French 
call it the Greek I, ' I grec' 

After the Conquest it strangely got a consonantal function 
added to the former. It succeeded to the place of an 
ancient G-initial, which was in a state of decay. This is 
the history of y in such wcwds z.s ye, yes, yet, year, yard, yare, 
yearn, yelp, yield, Sec, from the older forms ge, gese, git, gear, 
geard, gearo, georn, gilpan, gield. In the intervening period, 
while this transition was adoing, there appeared for two 
centuries or more (the twelfth to the fourteenth) a separate 
form of letter, neither g nor_y, which was written thus 5, and 
was ultimately dropped. It was a pity we lost this letter, 
as the result has been a heterogeneous combination of func- 
tions under the letter Y which it is difficult for a learner 
to disentangle. It is true as Lindley Murray said, that y 
is a consonant when it begins a syllable, and in every other 
situation it is a vowel. Had we retained the consonant 5 
we might have avoided this unnatural combination of vowel 
and consonant functions in a single letter. In old Scots 
it was retained in the form of z, as in the following, where 
year is written zeir : — 

' In witness quhairof we half subscrivit thise presents with our hands at 
Westminster the loth day of December, the zeir of God 1568 Zeirs. 

James, Regent, &c., &c.' 



Il8 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

S)Oyet was written zi't, as in Buchanan's Detection : — 

' Quhilk wryting being without dait, and thocht sum wordis thairin seme 
to the contrarie, zii is upon credibill ground! s supposit to have bene maid 
and written be hir befoir the deith of hir husband.' 

But SO uncertain is the fortune of language, that one mis- 
chance is avoided only to fall into another. This Scotch z, 
which had a justification in the cases quoted, was extended 
to supplant the English consonant y in other cases, as in 
york, which was written Zork. (Queen Mary's Letters, 
January, 1568.) 

In the word Vork the V had no consonantal antecedent : 
the old form was Eoforwic. The consonantal sound has 
grown out of vocalic crowding, just as the Saxon iw has 
produced the English j^fw. This y represents the German, 
Danish, and Swedish j, both in sound and in historical 
extraction. The Saxon iimg is in modern English young, 
and the y here sounds exactly as J sounds in the German 
jung, or in the Danish Jeg, or the Swedish Jag. The bringing 
out of this consonantal y is a feature of the modern lan- 
guage. It probably existed in Saxon times, but it was not 
expressed in writing. It is in the West that this y displays 
itself most conspicuously. In Barnes's poems we meet with 
yable, able ; yachen, aching ; yacre, acre ; yakker, acorn ; 
yale, ale ; yarbs, herbs ; yarm, arm ; yarn, earn ; yarnesi, 
earnest ; yean (Saxon eacnian) ; yeaze, ease. 

On Sunday evenings, arm in arm; — 

' O' Zunday evemens, yarm in yarm : — ' 

and first they'd go to see their lots of pot-herbs in the 
garden plots ; 

' An' vust tha'd goo to zee ther lots 
O' pot-yarbs in the ghiarden plots.' 

Traces of the same thing, but more slight, are noted in 
the opposite quarter, as in Miss Baker's Northants Glossary. 



I 



I 



\ 



THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. II9 

Our national proclivities in utterance are best discerned 
by the examination of instances where the pronunciation is 
least under observation, least exposed to modifying influ- 
ences, least self-conscious. This makes the evidence from 
the dialects so valuable. Next to this we may class those 
sounds which we utter but do not write, as the Y-sound at 
the beginning of the word ewe. It is unthought of because 
it never meets the eye. To the same category belongs the 
initial y in the unwritten name of the vowel u. Add to this 
the case above at p. 107, where kind is pronounced as kyi'nd, 
and we see how decided a proneness there is in us towards 
this consonant. Indeed, we must consider this y consonant 
as being in some special sense the property of the English 
language, in the same way as we consider our consonant 
J to be peculiarly a French product. 

The value of y has been further complicated by means 
of the fashion which prevailed in the fifteenth century of 
substituting it often for /. Already in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, in an ABC Poem, we find the letter y thus introduced : 

' Y for I in wryt is set.' 

A reaction followed and corrected this in some measure ; 
but still too many cases remained in which the y had got 
fixed in places where an i should have been. A conspicuous 
example is the word rhyme, which is from the Saxon rim = 
number, and which Dr. Guest always spells r/ii'me in his 
History of English Rhythms. 

Possibly the J/ was put for i in rhyme from confusion with 
the Greek pvdixos : at any rate we do owe many of our jf's 
to the Greek v, such as tyrant, zephyr, hydraulic, hyssop, 
hypocrisy, hypothesis. In fact, so commonly does the English 
Y represent the Greek v, that Dr. Latham would '■ limit the 
use of the letter y, when not final, as much as possible to 



1 2,0 THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. 

words of Greek origin/ Hyson and Hythe are the only two 
words in his Dictionary that begin with hy-, and are not 
Greek. Even the Saxon Hythe he would like to write Hithe,- 
and for Hyrst he prefers the form Hurst. 

Z is a letter of late introduction. During the Saxon time 
it appears in Bible translations in names like Zacheus, 
Zacharias; and otherwise only in one or two stray instances, 
e. g. Caziei, the Saxon form of the French town-name Chezy, 
as in the following description of the path of the Northmen 
in France : — 

' 887. Her for se here up ])urh ?5a brycge set Paris, and })a up andlang 
Sigene oS Maeterne. and ])a up on Mseterne oS Caziei.' 

887. This year went the foe up through the bridge at Paris, and then 
up along the Seine to the Marne, and then up the Marne to Chezy. 

We find s put for z as late as the fifteenth century: 
e. g. Sepherus for Zephyrus. 

Nor is this letter anything more than a foreigner among 
us now. There will be found very few genuine English 
words with a z in them. The only one I observe in the 
Dictionary under Z is zinc, which most likely represents the 
Saxon si72c = treasure. 



C 



CHAPTER II. 
SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

The spelling of our language has admitted a succession 
of changes from the earliest times to the present day. We 
now call our orthography fixed : but perhaps the next gene- 
ration will detect some changes that have taken place in our 
time. Orthography is in fact always in the rear of pro- 
nunciation, and therefore there is always room for improve- 
ment. But as a language grows old, it naturally tends 
towards being governed by precedent. We spell words as 
we have been taught to spell them. The more literature is 
addressed to the eye, the more that organ is humoured, and 
the ear is less and less considered. 

That which we call a settled orthography is a habit of 
spelling which admits only of rare modification, and tends 
towards a state of absolute immutability. 

When a language has become literary, its orthography 
has already begun to be fixed. The varieties of spelling 
which have taken place from the fourteenth century until 
now, may appear considerable to those who have only 
glanced at old books; but in reality they are very limited. 



122 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

A small variation will make a great difference in the legi- 
bility of a page, to the eye that is unaccustomed to such 
variation. It might be thought that the idea of orthography 
was a modern affair, and that the spelling of our early writers 
was chaotic and unstudied. But this would be a great 
mistake. 

The poet of the Ormulum (12 15) earnestly begs that in 
future copies of his work, respect may be had to his ortho- 
graphy. The passage has been quoted and translated 
above, on p. 51. 

Chaucer also, in the closing stanzas of his Troilus and 
Creseide, begs that no one will ' miswrite ' his little book, by 
which he means that no one should deviate from his ortho- 
graphy. 

' Go, little booke, go my little tragedie 



And kisse the steps whereas thou seest pace 
Of Vergil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, Stace. 
And for there is so great diversite 
In English, and in writing of our tong, 
So pray I to God, that none miswrite thee, 
Ne the mis-metre, for defaut of tong: 
And redd wherso thou be or eles song, 
That thou be understond,' &c. 

It was not for want of interest in orthography that so 
great diversity continued to exist, but it was from the 
obstacles which naturally delayed a common understanding 
on such a point. A standard was, however, set up in the 
fifteenth century, or at furthest in the sixteenth, by the 
masters of the Printing-press. It was the Press that de- 
termined our orthography. This may easily be discerned 
by the fact that whereas private letters continue for a long 
time to exhibit all the old diversity of spelling, the Bible of 
i6ii, and the First Folio of Shakspeare (1623) are sub- 
stantially in the orthography which is now prevalent and 
established. 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 23 

If any one will be at the trouble to compare the follow- 
ing verses from the Bible of 161 1 with our present Bible, 
he will see that the variation is not so great as at first sight 
appears. 

Diuers opinions of him among the people. The Pharisees are angry that 
their officers tooke him not, tf chide with Nicodemus for taking his part. 

37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, lesus stood, and cried, say- 
ing, If any man thirst, let him come vnto me, and drinke, 

38 He that beleeueth on me, as the Scripture hath saide, out of his belly 
shall flow riuers of liuing water. 

39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that beleeue on him should 
receiue. For the holy Ghost was not yet giuen, because that lesus was not 
yet glorified.) 

40 H Many of the people therefore, when they heard this saying, saide, 
Of a trueth this is the Prophet. 

41 Others said, This is the Christ. But some said. Shall Christ come out 
of Galilee ? 

42 Hath not the Scripture saide, that Christ commeth of the seede of 
Dauid, and out of the towne of Bethlehem, where Dauid was ? 

43 So there was a diuision among the people because of him. 

44 And some of them would haue taken him, but no man layed hands 
on him, 

45 H Then came the officers to the chiefe Priests and Pharises, and they 
said vnto them. Why haue ye not brought him ? 

46 The officers answered, Neuer man spake like this man. 

47 Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceiued ? 

48 Haue any of the rulers, or of the Pharises beleeued on him ? 

49 But this people who knoweth not the Law, are cursed. 

50 Nicodemus saith vnto them, (He that came to lesus by night, being 
one of them,) 

51 Doth our Law iudge any man before it heare him, & know what he 
doth? 

52 They answered, and said vnto him. Art thou also of Galilee ? Search, 
and looke : for out of Galilee ariseth no Prophet. 

53 And euery man went vnto his owne house. 

A large part of the strange eflfect which this specimen has 
to the modern eye is due to something which is distinct from 
spelling — namely, to a change in the use of certain characters. 
The modern distinction of J the consonant from i the vowel 
was not yet known. The v was not practically distinguished 
from the u. Instead o^ judge we see iudge : and instead of 



124 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

deceived it is decerned. These may come under the notion of 
orthography, but they cannot be called diversities of speUing. 
To these have to be added a few instances of e final, which 
have since been disused. Also a few more capital letters. 
Such are the chief elements to which the strange aspect is 
due. The only real differences in this piece from our pre- 
sent use, are beleeue, layed (for laid), commeth, trueth. 

Let us glance at a few of the changes which have pro- 
duced the present settlement. For this purpose we must 
look back to the last great disturbance, that is to say, to the 
Conquest and its sequel. At that time there had been a 
fixed orthography for a hundred years ; hardly less fixed 
than ours now is, after four centuries of printing. We 
must remember that the Press is a sort of dictator in ortho- 
graphy. If we were to judge of present English orthography 
by a collection of manuscripts of the day, it would be a 
different thing from judging of it by printed books. For 
a manuscript literature, that of the last hundred years of the 
Saxon period is singularly orthographical. 

The clashing of dialects in the transition period, and 
the French influence, combined to raise up a new sort of 
spelling in the place of the old. The tributary effects of the 
dialects are mostly obscure and hard to disentangle. The 
French influence being a strange element is much easier to 
follow. One of its earliest and most conspicuous results was 
the quiescence of the old guttural-aspirate h. This pro- 
duced more than one set of modifications in spelling. 

The habit of writing wh instead of the old hw was one 
of these. It seems that the decaying sound of the guttural 
gave the w-sound more prominence to the ear, and that 
accordingly the w was put before the h in writing. This 
alteration had the more effect on the appearance of the 
language, because many of the words so spelt are among 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 125 

the commonest and most frequently recurring. The follow- 
ing are some of the more conspicuous examples : — 

Hwa, who Hwylc, which 

Hwses, whose Hweol, wheel 

HwEel, whale Hwi, why 

Hwaer, where Hwil, while 

Hwset, what Hwisperung, whispering 

Hwaet-stan, whetstone Hwistlere, whistler 

Hwsete, wheat Hwit, white. 

The modern result is this, that the syllable which was 
pronounced from the throat (guttural), is now pronounced 
mainly on the lips (aspirate-labial). The Scotch retained the 
guttural much longer ; and the traces of it are still audible in 
Scotland. And they wrote as well as pronounced gutturally : 
thus, quha, quhilk, quhat, &c. Alexander Hume, a learned 
Scotchman, who was ' Scholemaester of Bath' in 1592, thus 
recounts a dispute he had with some Southrons on the point: 

' To clere this point, and alsoe to reform an errour bred in the south, and 
now usurped be our ignorant printeres, I wil tel quhat befel my self quhen 
I was in the south with a special gud frende of myne. Ther rease, upon sum 
accident, quhither quho, qvhen, quhat, etc., sould be symboHsed with q or w, 
a boat disputation betuene him and me. After manie conflictes (for we ofte 
encountered), we met be chance, in the citie of Baeth, with a Doctour of 
divinitie of both our acquentance. He invited us to denner. At table my 
antagonist, to bring the question on foot am.angs his awn condisciples, began 
that I was becum an heretik, and the doctour spering how, ansuered that 
I denyed quho to be spelled with a lu, but with qu. 

Be quhat reason? quod the doctour. Here, I beginning to lay my 
grundes of labial, dental, and guttural soundes and symboles, he snapped 
me on this hand and he on that, that the doctour had mikle a doe to win 
me roome for a syllogisme. Then (said I) a labial letter can not symboliz 
a guttural syllab. But w is a labial letter, quho a guttural sound. And 
therfoer w can not symboliz quho, nor noe syllab of that nature. Here the 
doctour 'staying them again (for al barked at ones), the proposition, said he, 
I understand ; the assumption is Scottish, and the conclusion false. Quherat 
al laughed, as if I had bene dryven from al replye, and I fretted to see 
a frivolouse jest goe for a solid ansuer.' Of the Orthographie of the Britan 
Tongue, by Alexander Hume (Early English Text Society, 1865), p. 18. 

To the same cause must be attributed the motive for 
changing the spelling of liht, niht, mihf, &c., to light, night, 
7night. 



125 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

Probably the g was prefixed to the h in order to insist on 
the h being uttered as a guttural. If so, it has failed. The 
guttural writing remains as a historical monument, but the 
sound is no longer heard except in Scotland and the conter- 
minous parts of England. 

After it became quiescent, it was apt to be employed care- 
lessly or arbitrarily. For example, Spenser wrote the adjec- 
tive white in the following unrecognisable manner, whight. 

' His Belphoebe was clad 
All in a silken camus lilly whight.' 

Faery Queene, ii. 3, 26. 

So also spright was written instead of sprite ; and although 
it is now obsolete, yet its derivative sprightly is still retained 
in use. 

This gh has now two treatments. In the one case it 
is quiescent; as in plough, though, through, daughter, 
slaughter. In the other it sounds likely as, enough, rough, 
laughter, &c. Probably this arose from the confluence of 
northern and southern pronunciations. On such a point 
as this some light might be gained by observations upon 
local and family names. In some parts of England the 
name "Waugh is pronounced as Waw, and in others as Waff. 
Can it be shewn that the latter is Anglian and the former 
Saxon ? 

It would appear that gh has been formerly sounded like 
f in words wherein it is nov\^ quiescent. The following 
quotation from Surrey seems to indicate that taught in his 
time might be pronounced as toft\ — 

♦Farewell! thou hast me taught. 
To think me not the first 
That love hath set aloft, 
And casten in the dust.' 

And Bunyan, who as a Bedfordshire man would belong to 



1 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 27 

the northern or Anghan dialect, pronounced daughter as 

dafter : — 

' Despondency, good man, is coming after. 
An so is also Much-afraid, his daughter.' 

There is one word of this orthography whose pronunci- 
ation is not yet uniformly established (in the public reading 
of Scripture), and that is the word draught. The colloquial 
pronunciation is now draf/, but in Dryden we find the other 
sound : — 

' Better to hunt the fields for health unbought, 
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.' 

A very large proportion of the words beginning with c 
were now (i.e. after the transition period) spelt either with 
K or with CH. 

Examples of a Saxon c turned into k : — 

Cseg, key Cnawan, know 

Cene, keen Cnedan, knead 

Ceol, keel Cneow, knee 

Cent, Keni Cniht, knight 

Cepan, keep Cy^, kyth 

Cnapa, knave Cyn, kin. 

Examples of Saxon words beginning with c, which in 
modern English have taken ch instead of c : — 

Ceafu, chaff Cidan, chide 

Ceaster, Chester Cinne, chin 

Ceorl, churl Circe, church 

Ceosan, choose Cyle, chill 

Cild, child Cypman, chapman. 

It is a point of much interest and of some uncertainty, 
how the ck is to be accounted for in this class of examples. 
Was the change only in the spelhng, and had these words 
been pronounced with the ch sound even while they were 
written with the c ? That this was not the case universally 
the Scotch form J^i'rk is a sufficient evidence. But may it 
have been so partially — may the chi'r/ have been in the 



128 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

southern and western pronunciation ? Something of this 
sort may be seen at present in Scandinavia. The Swedish 
and Danish languages have initial k in common in a 
large number of words. The Danish k has no chirt any- 
where ; but the Swedish k is pronounced as ch when it is 
followed by certain vowels. The Danish word for church 
is kirke ; the Swedish word is kyrka. In the former case 
the K is pronounced as in Scotland ; in the latter it sounds 
like the first consonant in the English church. A like divi- 
sion of pronunciation may possibly have existed in this 
island before the Conquest. Or the chirt may have been 
still more partial than this ; it may have had but an obscure 
and disowned existence (like the sh sound as a substitute 
for the ch in Germany) ; and the French influence may have 
fostered it by a natural affinity, and given it a permanent 
place in the English language. 

Those words which in Saxon began with cw adopted the 
Latin q initial, as described in the last chapter. 

In the close of words also ch has taken the place of the 
Saxon c (or sometimes cc) as in church (cyrice), speech 
(spaec), reach (raecan), teach (t^can), and sometimes it has 
taken the form tch as in latch (Iseccan), thatch (]j3ec), match 
(^^maecca), wretch (wreccea). This -tch extended at one 
time to words in which we are not familiar with it;- thus in 
Spenser's Faery Queene, i. 2. 21, we read ritch for * rich.' The 
quaint old Scottish grammarian before quoted, speaks con- 
temptuously of this tch development of our pronunciation, 
calling it ' an Italian chtrt.^ 

' With c we spil the aspiration, turning it into an Italian chirt ; as, 

char;te, cherrie, of quhilk hereafter This consonant, evin quher in 

the original it hes the awne sound, we turn it into the chirt we spak of, 
quhilk indeed can be symbolized with none, neither greek nor latin letteres ; 
as, from cano, chant ; from canon, chanon : from castus, chast ; &c.' 
Of the Orthographie, &c,, pp. 13, 14. 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 29 

Analogous to the use of / before the ch (anciently c) is the 
putting a d before an ancient g. Thus we have the form 
hedge (A. S. hege), wedge (A. S. wecg), ridge (A.S. rig), &c. 
The more classical Anglo-Saxon form is hrycg, but this is 
not the form which would tend to produce ridge. On the 
contrary, it has produced the modern form rick, a synonym 
for a stack of corn or hay. 

In the word knowledge the same mode of orthography is 
apphed by a false analogy ; and ohlidge has been recalled to 
simplicity by reference to its original, the French obliger. 

The c before the g has just the contrary effect to that of 
the d. While dg indicates the soft dental or palatal sound of 
g, eg indicates the dry and guttural sound, either like our 
modern gg or Hke ck. 

Saxon words beginning in sc- are in modern English 
spelt sh- : e. g. — 



Sceaf, sheaf 


Sceap, sheep 


Sceaft, shaft 


Scearp, sharp 


Sceal, shall 


Sceort, short 


Sceamu, shame 


Sceo, shoe 


Sceanca, shank 


Scild, shield. 



The vowels will afford further examples of the great 
revolution in orthography which has taken place since Saxon 
times. The most constant of the vowels has been the first, A. 
Many words can be quoted in which it has remained un- 
altered from Saxon times: e.g. and, hake, can, fare, hare, 
hale, hawk, lade, lake, land, make, man, name, sake, shake, 
sallow, stand, staple, saddle, stare, tame, wan, wake. 

When changed, it has oftenest become o, as bone (ban), 
hoth (batwa), hot (hat), mon (Scottish for man). 

Sometimes we see a compromise, the old a being 
retained by the side of the new o, as road (A.S. rad), load 
(A.S. lad). 



130 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

Sometimes e has taken the place of a, as s/ep (stapan). 

Where the Saxon a final has become 0, as it generally 
has, the addition of the e final of the fifteenth century has 
come in to produce an effect which is never seen on a Saxon 
page. The combination oe is absolutely unknown in Saxon 
orthography, but is quite familiar to our eyes in such words 
Sis/be, hoe, roe, woe, toe, from the Saxon forms_/^, rd, wd, td. 
In many words we have disused this ending where it was in 
vogue, as agoe, alsoe, &c. In all of these cases, however, 
e has no sound, nor ever had. It is, in fact, the ^-subscript, 
of which hereafter. 

On the other hand, the vowel-combination eo was very 
common in Saxon, but in English it has been always very 
rare. Ben Jonson said ' it is found but in three words in 
our tongue, yeoman, people, jeopardy. Which were truer 
written ye'man, pe'ple, jepardy! To these of Ben Jonson's 
may now fairly be added the word leopard : for though the . 
eo in this word has a Latin origin, yet its acquired pronun- 
ciation stamps it with an English character. 

The diphthongs 01, as in /oil, soil, and ou, as m young, 
about, are now common in 'Saxon' words, but there were no 
such in Saxon. They are among the French transformations. 
Some of them we have already dropped ; thus we no longer 
use horrour, terrour. There is a disposition in some quarters 
to do the same with honour, and also to vindicate the pure 
Saxon word so unjustly Frenchified into neighbour. This ou 
is sometimes present in sound when absent from the spelling. 
If we compare the words move, prove, with such words as 
love, dove, shove, &c., we become aware that the former, though 
they have laid aside their French spelling from mouvoir, 
prouver, yet have retained their French sound notwith- 
standing. 



I 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 131 

But the vowel which makes the greatest figure on the 
Saxon page is m ; and this is altogether absent in English. 

These are some of the more conspicuous instances of 
that revolution in orthography which has caused Saxon 
literature to look so uncouth and strange in its own native 
country. 

English spelling has been produced by such a variety of 
heterogeneous causes, that its inconsistencies are not to be 
wondered at. Grimm has remarked on the want of regu- 
larity in our vowel usage : for we use a double e in //lee, and 
a single one in ??te, whereas the vowel-sound is alike in the 
pronunciation. The probable cause was the aim at dis- 
tinction between the pronoun f/iee and the definite article 
f/ie ; words which down to the end of the fifteenth century 
were written alike, and often check the reader. The eye has 
its claims as well as the ear, when so much is written and 
read; and this accounts for many cases of dissimilar spelling 
of similar sounds, as 5e the verb and dee the insect. 

If we now leave the Saxon and notice the French words 
that entered largely into our language in the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries, there is this general observation to be 
made concerning them : — They were at first pronounced as 
French words ; and although the original pronunciation was 
soon impaired, yet a trace of their native sound followed 
them for a long time, just as happens in like cases in our 
own day. The French accentuation would remain after 
every other tinge of their origin had faded out. But in 
course of time they were so completely familiarised that their 
origin was lost sight of, and then they insensibly slid into 
our English pronunciation. The spelling would sometimes 
follow all these changes, but in other cases the habit of 
writing was too strongly fixed. 



132 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION: 

Of this we have not merely the argument from general 
analogy, which tells us that in like cases it is always so, but 
we have also two kinds of direct proof. One is from the 
spelling. The word honour is spelt in a manner for which 
its present pronunciation does not account. In pronun- 
ciation the weighty syllable is the first, yet in the spelling we 
throw the preponderance into the last syllable. Our spelling 
is traditional, and represents, not a present, but a past pro- 
nunciation. When this word honour was first introduced 
into English, it was actually pronounced, for a long time, 
with the accent and vocalic fullness on the last syllable, just 
as the French honneur h to this day. Our orthography of 
honour, so contradictory to our pronunciation, would be sufr 
ficient, with the example of honneur before us, to satisfy us 
that this word must have retained its French pronunciation 
for a long time after its use was estabhshed among us. 
But the fact may also be established by direct proof. The 
use of this and analogous words in poetry enables us by the 
rhythm to decide absolutely on so much of their pronun- 
ciation as is involved in their accentuation, and that, in the 
case before us, is the chief thing. We find the word as early 
as the second text of Layamon, which we may fix at soon 
after a.d. 1200. Thus we read in vol. i. p. 259 (ed. 
Madden) :— 

and leide hine mid honure 
and laid him with honour 

heje in )5an toure 
high in *the tower. 

Here it is plain to the experienced reader, notwithstanding 
the inexactness of the metre, that the word honure is ac- 
cented on the second syllable. But to the general reader 
this quotation would not be convincing. If, therefore, we 
pass from the opening of the thirteenth to the close of the 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 133 

fourteenth century, and after a lapse of almost two hundred 
years observe the placing of the word in the rhythm of 
Chaucer, every one who has an ear will be satisfied. In 
the line (Prologue to Canterbury Tales, 1. 46) — 

' Trouthe and [ honour, | fredom | and cur | tesie,' 
the second syllable of honour is in the stroke or stress of the 
iambus. Although honour is quite emancipa'ted from its 
hereditary traces of foreign origin, as far as pronunciation 
goes, it is still written with a half-French spelling. The 
adjective honourable is anglicised in the titular use of the 
word, when it is written Honorable : and there are some 
authors who now omit the u in the substantive and adjective 
alike, and upon all occasions. The American writers are 
conspicuous for their disposition to reject these traces of 
early French influence. 

Thus much has been said about this one word, because it 
is the type of a large class to which the same remarks apply. 
And in reading early English poets, if we care to catch the 
music as well as the sense, we must bear in mind the differ- 
ence of pronunciation. That difference is not in all cases 
easy to seize and define, but the case of words from the 
French is exceedingly clear. 

The tendency of that nation is the reverse of ours in the 
matter of accentuation. They throw the accent often on 
the close of a word, we always try to get it as near the be- 
ginning as possible. There is a large body of French 
words in our language which have at length yielded to the 
influences by which they are surrounded, and have come to 
be pronounced as English-born words. The same words 
were for centuries accented in the French manner, and 
these are especially the ones we ought to be familiar with, 
if we would wish not to stumble at the rhythm of our early 
poets. 



734 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

Chaucer has 



aventure for 


our adventure 


contree , 


„ country 


corage 
fortune 


„ courage 
fortune 


laboiire , 


, labour 


langage 


language 


mariage , 


„ marriage 


nature , 


, nature 


reson 


, reason 


vertiie , 


, virtue 


viage 


, voyage 


visage , 


visage 



Long after Chaucer did this French influence continue 
to be felt in our language. Even so late as Milton consider- 
able traces of it are found in his rhythms. For example, 
he accents asped on the last syllable, as in Paradise Los/, 
yi. 450: — 

' His words here ended, but his meek aspect 
Silent yet spake, and breath'd immortal love.' 

And in vi. 81 : — 

' In battailous aspect, and nearer view.' 

The word contest is accentuated by Milton as cotttest. 
Paradise Lost, iv. 872 : — 

' Not likely to part hence without contest.' 

Again, in the last line of the Ninth Book : — 

' And of their vain contest appeared no end.* 

This subject is ably treated by Mr. Hiram Corson, an 
American scholar, in his Introduction to a Student's Edition 
of Chaucer's Legende of Goode Women. 

The case of the word contrary (cited by that writer) is 
interesting, especially as we are told in Walker's Pronouncing 
Dictionary, that * the accent of this word is invariably placed 
on the first syllable by all correct speakers, and as con- 
stantly removed to the second by the illiterate and vulgar/ 
These seem rather hard terms to apply to the really 
time-honoured and classical pronunciation of contrary. 



I 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION, 135 

but yet Walker doubtless expressed the current judgment 
of the polite society of his and of our day. 

We find it in Shakspeare, Romeo and Juliet, i. 5 : — 
' You must contrary me, marry 'tis time.' 

And Spenser, Faery Queene, ii. 2. 24, where I will quote the 
whole stave for the sake of its beauty : — 

' As a tall ship tossed in troublous seas 
(Whom raging windes, threatning to make the pray 
Of the rough rockes, doe diversly di^ase) 
Meetes two contrarie billowes by the way, 
That her on either side doe sore assay, 
And boast to swallow her in greedy grave ; 
Shee, scorning both their spights, does make wide way, 
And, with her brest breaking the fomy wave. 
Does ride on both their backs, and faire herself doth save.* 

And Milton in Samson Agonistes, 972 : — 

' Fame, if not double-fac'd, is double-mouth'd, 
And with contrary blast proclaims most deeds.' 

It was not only in our French borrowings that the accent 
had a place which now appears strange. There are words 
of home growth which are found accented on the last, where 
we now accent them on the first. Example : alsoe, in the 
Faery Queene, ii. 5. 15: — 

' Losse is no shame, nor to bee less then foe ; 
But to be lesser then himselfe doth marre 
Both loosers lott and victours prayse alsoe ; 
Vaine others overthrowes who selfe doth overthrow.' 

We now say also and not also : and the principle of the 
transfer is here exactly the same as in the French instances 
above ; viz. the prevailing tendency to throw the accent back 
on the beginning of words. 

That which originally gave also the disposition to be ac- 
cented on the last, was this : It consisted of two words eal 
(all) and swa (so), of which swa was the leading word, and 
eal was a subordinate and modifying prefix ; and so long as 



136 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

this continued to be remembered, the stress was naturally 
on swa or so, even after they ceased to be separate words, 
and had passed into the compound state. It is the same 
principle that causes us, when we say, very much or quite 
well to lay the stress on much and well, because these are 
the leading words, to which very and quite are subordinate 
as qualifying adverbs. 

The same reasoning applies to other home-bred com- 
pounds, which were once accented on their last syllable, but 
are now altered. It will be found that when they existed as 
separate words and were in grammatical relations to each 
other, the latter word was the more substantial, and the prior 
word was the satellite, whether as adverb or adjective. Such 
is the case of the word cilway or dhvays, which figures as 
alwdy in the close of the following beautiful stave from 
the Faery Queene, i. i. 34 : — 

' A litle lowly hermitage it was, 
Downe in a dale, hard by a forest side. 
Far from resort of people that did pas 
In traveill to and froe : a litle wyde 
There was an holy chappell edifyde, 
Wherein the Hermite dewly wont to say 
His holy things each morne and eventyde : 
Thereby a cristall streanie did gently play, 
Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alwiiy.' 

In like manner Spenser has the accentuations black- 
smith, Faery Queene, iv. 5. 33; bloods he'd, ii. 6. 34; brimstone, 
ii. 10. 26; earthquake, iii. 12. 2; offspring, iii. 9. 44 (also 
Milton in Paradise Lost, ii. 310; iii. i); upright, in Mother 
Hubberd 728; all which cases might be grammatically 
justified. But the grammatical relations are only part cause ; 
to them has to be added the consideration that final accents 
were then more familiar than now, and moreover, that the 
language was in that fluid transitional state in which the poet 
has a much larger field of discretion than in later times. 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 ^'J 

Accordingly we find many words diversely accented by the 
same poet. Hence there is need of caution in using a 
poetical accentuation as an absolute criterion of the old 
pronunciation. Some examples are purely arbitrary for the 
immediate needs of the rhythm. Such are endless^ Faery 
Queene, iii. 5. 42 ; further, vi. 10. 37 ; but many might 
appear arbitrary which can be accounted for on in- 
dependent grounds: as lightning, Faery Queene, iii. 12. 2; 
nightly, vi. 12. 14 ; therefore, iii. 5. 46. 

We must not proceed further with the poetical illustrations 
in this place, lest we should seem to trend on the subject of 
accent in its modulatory relations, which will have to be 
treated separately. 

Although the disposition of our language is to throw the 
accent back, yet we are far from having divested ourselves of 
words accented on the last syllable. There are a certain num- 
ber of cases in which this constitutes a useful distinction, when 
the same word acts two parts. Such is the case of humane 
and human ; of august and the month of August, which is 
in fact the selfsame word. Sometimes the accent marks the 
distinction between the verb and the noun : thus we say 
to rehe'l, to record ; but a re'bel, a record. When the lawyers 
speak of a record (substantively), they merely preserve the 
original French pronunciation, and thereby remind us that 
the distincdon last indicated is a pure English invention. 
We have many borrowed words to which we have given 
a domestic character by setting them to our own music. 

But independently of this set of words in which the accent 
on the last syllable is of manifest utility, there are others 
naturally accented in the same manner in which there seems 
to be no disposition to introduce a change. Examples : 
polite, urbane, jocose, divine, complete. 

To these Romance examples may be added some of pure 



1 38 SPELLING AND PJRONUNCIATION. 

Saxon, e.g. all the disyllabic compounds beginning with 
5e- : become, he/ore, beware, beyond, behead, bethink, beget, be- 
queathe, bequest, below — the emphasis, which naturally rests 
on the last, has never been transferred by fashion to the 
first. And that is because the subsidiariness of the be- has 
never been lost sight of. The English disyllables which 
are now accented on the last syllable amount to the number 
of 1635, as I know from a manuscript Hst of them which 
I have, in the handwriting of a friend. 

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, it was 
a trick and fashion of the times to lengthen words by the 
addition of an e, and also to double the consonants. These 
are the characteristic features of the spelling with which 
we are familiar in Spenser, who is edited in the ortho- 
graphy of his time. In the following passage ^the word 
wones ( = dwells) is written wonnes : — 

' For now the best and noblest Knight aUve 
Prince Arthur is, that wonnes in Faerie lond.' 

Faery Queene, ii. 3. 18. 

In the same way he writes bespi'inckled, himselfe, thanklesse, 
blincked, dogge, lincked, home, cleare, ecchoed, agame : — 

' At last they heard a home that shrilled cleare 
Throughout the wood that ecchoed againe.' lb. 20. 

A great number of these final ^'s have been abolished, 
others have been utilised, as observed on p. 140; but these 
fashions mostly leave their traces in hereditary relics. 
Such is the e at the end of therefore, which has no use as 
expressive of sound, and which exerts a delusive effect on 
the sense, making the word look as if it were a compound 
oifore like before, instead of withy^r, which is the fact ; and 
for this reason some American books now print therefor. 

So with reference to the doubling of the k by ck. Many 
of these remained to a late date : and there are some few 



SRELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 39 

archaisms of this sort which have only just been disused. 
Such are poetick, ascetick, politick, catholick, instead of poetic, 
ascetic, politic, catholic. This was the constant orthography 
of Dr. Johnson. 'The next year (17 13), in which Cato 
came upon the stage, was the grand climacterick of Addison's 
reputation.' Johnson's Lives of the English Poets. When 
such excrescences are dismissed, it is quite usual to make 
an exception in favour of proper names. There are very 
good and practical reasons why these should affect a spell- 
ing somewhat removed from the common habits of the lan- 
guage, and accordingly we find that almost every discarded 
fashion of spelling lives on somewhere in proper names. 
The orthography of Frederick has not been reformed, and 
the ck holds its ground advantageously against the timidly 
advancing fashion of writing Frederic. 

To the same period belongs the practice of writing 
double / at the end of such words as celestiall, mortall, 
faithfull, eternall, counsell, naturall, unequall, wakefull, cruell : 
also in such words as lilly {Faery Queene, ii. 3. 26). 

It is a relic of this fashion that we still continue to write 
till, all, full, instead of til, al,ful. 

If we add a still lingering inclination to c for s, and_y for 
i, we have the main features of that orthography, which may 
roughly be dated as lying between the reigns of Henry VI 
and George III. 

Spenser has bace desyre, Faery Queene, ii. 3. 23, for base 
desire. 

The vacillation between c and s terminated discriminatively 
in a few instances. Thus we have prophesy the verb, and 
prophecy the noun : to practise and a practice : license and 
licefice; the former for a legal permission or, as the French 
say, ' concession'; the latter for an abuse of liberty. 

' Licence they mean when they cry liberty.' Mihon. 



140 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

In the case of the e-suhscripi, that which had originally 
been nothing more than a trick or fashion of the times, 
came to have a definite signification assigned to it. In the 
fifteenth century it was a mere Frenchism, a fashion and 
nothing more. But in the sixteenth century it came to be 
regarded as a grammatical sign that the proper vowel of the 
syllable was long^. Against this orthographical idiom the 
Scotch grammarian, Alexander Hume, who dedicated his 
book to King James I, stoutly protested : — 

' We use alsoe, almost at the end of everie word, to wn'te an idle e. This 
sum defend not to be idle, because it aifectes the voual before the consonant, 
the sound quherof many tymes alteres the signification ; as, hop is altera 
taiitum pede saltare; hope is sperare: fir, abies; fyre, ignis: ?ifin, pinna; fine, 
probatus : bid, jubere ; bide, manere : with many moe. It is true that the 
sound of the voual befoer the consonant many tymes doth change the sig- 
nification ; but it is as untrue that the voual e behind the consonant doth 
change the sound of the voual before it. A voual devyded from a voual 
be a consonant can be noe possible means return thorough the consonant 
into the former voual. Consonanles betuene vouales are lyke partition walles 
betuen roomes. Nothing can change the sound of a voual but an other 
voual coalescing with it into one sound, of quhilk' we have spoaken suf- 
ficientlie, cap. 3. 

To illustrat this be the same exemples, saltare is to hop; sperare is 
to hoep : ahies is fir; ignis _;3'^." or, if you wil,^er ; jubere is 6iof; manere 
byd or hied. 

Yet in sum case we are forced to tolerat this idle e ; i . in wordes ending 
in c, to break the sound of it ; as peace, face, lace, justice, etc. : 2. behind s, 
in wordes wryten with this s; as, false, ise, case, muse, use, etc.: 3, behind 
a broaken g ; as, hiawlege, savage, suage, aid age. Ther may be moe, and 
these I yeld because I ken noe other waye to help this necessitie, rather then 
that I can think anye idle symbol tolerable in just orthographic.' Of the Or- 
thographie, &c., p. 21. 

The fifteenth century is the earliest period to which we 
can refer the French fashion of combining gu in the be- 
ginning of a word to express nothing more than the G-sound. 
Chaucer has guerdon, which is a French word ; but he did 
not apply this spelling to words of English origin, such 

^ To indicate the subservient use of this letter, I have (for want of a 
better expression) borrowed from a somewhat analogous thing in Greek 
grammar the term e-sxibscript. 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 141 

as, guess, guest, guild, guile, guilt. These in Chaucer are 
written without the u. 

In the sixteenth century there appeared a fashion of 
writing certain words with initial sc- which before had simple 
S-. It was merely a way of writing the words, and was 
without any significance as to the sound. Hence the forms 
scion, scent, scite, scituation, and scymitar. It probably sprung 
from the analogy of such Latin forms as scene, science, 
sceptre, &c. The case of scymitar may be justified by 
reference to the Italian form scimitarra, though the First 
Folio of Shakspeare had semitar and symitare, as — 

' By this Symitare 
That slew the Sophy and a Persian Prince.' 

Mercbatit of Venice, ii. I. 

But scion, scent, and scite have nothing for them but fancy. 
Scion is an obscure word, probably an old gardening term, 
as that passage of Othello i. 3 seems to indicate : ' whereof 
I take this that you call Loue, to be a Sect, or Seyen.' (First 
Folio) As ' sect ' means a cutting, so ' seyen ' or scion, 
seems to be a slip or sucker. Or rather perhaps a graft, as 
it clearly is in Henry V, iii. 5 : — 

' Our Syons, put in wilde and sauage Stock, 
Spirt up so suddenly into the Clouds, 
And ouer-looke their grafters?' First Folio. 1 623. 

Scent is from the Latin seniire, French sentir, and is 
written sent in Spenser, Faery Queene, i. i. 53. 

Scite seems to be returning to its natural orthography of 
site, as being derived from the Latin situs: and we once 
more write it as did Spenser and Ben Jonson. But there 
are still persons of authority who adhere to the seventeenth- 
century practice — the practice of Fuller, Burnet, and Drayton. 

In the sixteenth century there was a great disposition to 
prefix a w before certain words beginning with an h or with 



142 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

an B. This seems to have been due to assimilation. There 
existed of old in the language a group of words beginning 
with wh and wr ; such as, whale, wharf, what, which, who, 
wheat, wheel, when, where, whither, &c.y wreak, wreath, 
wrestle, wrath, wrist, write, wright, &c. — all familiar words, 
and some of them words of the first necessity. The con- 
tagion of these examples spread to words beginning with 
H or R simple, and the movement was perhaps aided in 
some measure by the desire to reassert the languishing 
gutturalism of h and (we may add) of e. 

This was the means of engendering some strange forms 
of orthography, which either became speedily extinct or 
maintained an obscure existence. For example; whote is 
found instead of i^^/y whome instead oi home ; wrote instead 
of root. But besides these obscure forms, others sprang up 
under the same influence, which have retained a place in 
standard English. Among such may be quoted whole instead 
of hole or hale, which sense it bears in the English New 
Testament, though it has since run off from the sense of 
hale, sound (integer), into that of complete (totus). But, 
famous as this word has become from its frequent presence 
in our New Testament — ' And he was made whole from that 
very hour' — yet there is another word of this class which 
has a still greater celebrity. It is that ill-appreciated word 
wretchlessness, in our XVIIth Article. To understand this 
word, we have only to look at it when divested of its initial 
w, as retchlessness ; and then, according to principles already 
defined, to remember that an ancient Saxon c at the end of 
a syllable commonly developed into tch; and in this way we 
get back to the verb to reck, Anglo-Saxon recan, to care for. 
So that retch-less-7iess is equivalent to care-nought-state of 
mind, that is to say, it is much the same thing as ' despera- 
tion.' The prefixed iv has in this instance proved fatal to 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. J 43 

the word. The /ck form^ of this root has fallen out of use. 
Most probably the prefixing of this w has extinguished it. 
For it had the eifect of creating a confusion between this 
word and wretch, a word totally distinct, and this is one of 
the greatest causes of words dying out, when they clash 
with others and promote confusion. We still retain, how- 
ever, the verb to 7'eck, and also reckless and recklessness, 
which means the same as wretchlessness. 

Examples of whole for hot are found in the writings of the 
Reformers. An instance may be readily quoted from one 
of the Martyrs of the Reformation : — ' Them which went 
about to make whole and to furnish their cold and empty 
kitchens.' (John Philpot, in Parker Society, p. 414). 

The Bible-translator, Myles Coverdale [Parker Society, i. 
17), spelt r aught (the preterite of reach, and equivalent of 
our reached) with a w. Speaking of Adam stretching forth 
his hand to pick the forbidden fruit, he says, ' he wrought 
life and died the death.' That is to say, he (raught) 
snatched at life, and, &c. 

In the case of zvhole for hole, the language has been 
accidentally enriched. A new word has been introduced, and 
one which has made for itself a place of the first importance 
in the language. For the expression the whole has obtained 
pronominal value in English. 

This prevalence of the initial w is perhaps in some measure 
to be traced to an influence from the western counties. At 
any rate, it is there that we still observe an excess of the 
same tendency. One of the most remarkable instances of 
this change (remarkable because it was made in the pronun- 
ciation only and not in the writing of the word) is that of 
the numeral one. It used to be pronounced as written, very 
like the preposition oft, a sound naturally derived from its 
original form in the Saxon numeral an. But it has now long 



144 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

been pronounced as wujsr or won (in Devonshire wonn), and 
this change may with probability be placed at the close of 
the sixteenth century. It was apparently a western habit 
which got into standard English. In the eastern parts of. 
England, and especially in London, it is well-known ver- 
nacular to say UN, commonly written 'un, as if a Z£^ had 
been elided : e.g. 'a good 'un.' In the West may be heard 
' the wonn en the wother ' for ' the one and the other.' 

One of the features of the Dorset dialect, as exhibited in 
the poems of the Rev. William Barnes, is the broad use of 
this initial w, both in the first numeral and in other words 
such as woak for oak, woM for old, zvoa^s for oats, in which 
the practice has not been generally adopted. 

' John Bloom he wer a jolly soul, 

A grinder o' the best o' meal, 
Bezide a river that did roll, 

Vrom week to week, to push his wheel. 
His flour were all a-meade o' wheat ; 
An' fit vor bread that vo'k mid eat ; 
, Vor he would starve avore he'd cheat. 

" Tis pure," woone woman cried ; 
" Ay, sure," woone mwore replied ; 
"You'll vind it nice. Buy ivoonce, buy twice," 
Cried worthy Bloom the miller,' 

The same worthy miller sitting in his oaken chair is 
described as 

' A-zitten in his cheair o' woak.' 

To the same tendency belongs such spellings as Iwoad, 
mwore, for ' load,' ' more,' &c., which occur in the same 
author. 

But while we point to the western counties as the pos- 
sible source of this feature, we must not overlook the fact that 
in Yorkshire, and generally throughout the North, one is pro- 
nounced wonn, and oats are called wufs, as distinctly as in 
Gloucestershire and the West of England. Whatever regions 
we may trace it to, we must regard this w with particular 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. [45 

interest as being a creation of the English speech-genius. 
To the Danish it is ungenial ; they have dropped it in words 
where it is of ancient standing, and where we have it in 
common with the Germans, as in week, wool, wolf, &c., 
which the Danes call uge, uld, ulf, &c. 

The Germans do in fact write the w in these words, 
SBoc^e, $5oUe, 3Sulf. But they do not properly share with 
us our w ; for they pronounce it ■ as our v, and in this 
respect they leave us in the sole possession of our w, which 
is accordingly a distinct feature and special birthright of 
English, as much so as the G-like J is of the French lan- 
guage. It is plain that in some words this consonant w 
has grown up out of nothing ; in many more (as we began 
by saying) it has been prefixed assimilatively. 

This principle of assimilation displays itself in many little 
peculiarities of our spelling. It was on this principle that 
the word kiln came to be spelt after miln. This antique 
form of 7nill has left its trace in the family name of Milner. 
This word had inherited the n, — Latin molendinum, Saxon 
myln. But the other is a native word cyL Of the three 
times that it occurs in the Authorised Version of 161 1, it is 
once written kilne, 2 Sam. xii. 31, and twice it is kill^ Jer. 
xliii. 9, Neh. iii. 14. 

It was on the same principle that the word could acquired 
its L. This word has no natural right to the l at all, being 
of the same root as can, and the second syllable in uncouth, 
viz. from the verb which in Saxon was written cunnan. In 
would and should the l is hereditary; but could acquired the 
L by mere force of association with them. And it seems 
probable that the silence of the l in all three of these words 
may be due to the example of could. The coud sound 
kept its place alongside of the written could^ and at length 
drew would and should over to the like pronunciation. In 

L 



146 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

the poet Surrey and his contemporaries we find would and 
even could rhymed to mould ; and it is quite likely that 
pedantry forced could for a time into a pronunciation an- 
swering to its new spelling. It seems that l drops its sound 
easily before the dentals ; for though we now pronounce 
all the letters in the word fault, yet our fathers ignored 
the L in this word also. In the Deserted Village it rhymes 
to aught : — 

' Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught, 
The love he bore to learning was in fault.' 

But this is, in fact, only one of the many instances in 
which we have dropped a French pronunciation for one of 
our own making, and in the making of which we have been 
led by the spelling. 

Between spelling and pronunciation there is a mutual 
attraction, insomuch that when spelling no longer follows 
the pronunciation, but is hardened into orthography, the pro- 
nunciation begins to move towards the spelling. A familiar 
illustration of this may be found in the words Derby, clerk, 
in which the er sounds as ar, but which many persons, 
especially of that class which is beginning to claim educated 
rank, now pronounce literally. The pronunciation itself was 
a good Parisian fashion in the fifteenth century. Villon, 
the French poet of that period, aff"ords in his rhymes some 
good illustrations of this. He rhymes Robert, haubert, with 
pluspart, poupart ; barre with terre ; appert with part, 
despart, &c ^. 

But it must have been much older than the time of Villon. 
In Chaucer, Prologue 391, we are not to suppose that 
Dertemouthe is to be pronounced as it was by the boy who 
in one of our great schools was the cause of hilarity to his 

•* CEuvrei. Completes de Francois Villon, ed. Jannet, p. xxiii. 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION, I47 

class-fellows by calling that seaport Dirty-mouth. The whole 
word is a trisyllable in Chaucer ; but the first syllable repre- 
sents the same sound as Dart now does. Another illustra- 
tion of er representing the sound of ar is in our word 
merchant, which at first would have been a mere variety of 
spelling for marchant, as it is spelt in Chaucer, according 
to its French extraction. Both forms are preserved in the 
case o^ person 2,n^ parson. 

There are other familiar instances in which we may trace 
the influence of orthography upon pronunciation. The 
generation which is now in the stage beyond middle life, 
are some of them able to remember when it was the correct 
thing to say Lunnon. At that time young people practised 
to say it, and studied to fortify themselves against the vul- 
garism of saying London, according to the literal pronun- 
ciation. At the same time ' Sir John ' was pronounced with 
the accent on Sir, in such a manner that it was liable to be 
mistaken for surgeon. This accentuation of * Sir John ' may 
be traced further back, however, even to Shakspeare, unless 
our ears deceive us. 2 Henry VI, ii. 3. 13 : 



' Live in your country here in banishment, 
With Sir John Stanley in the Isle of Man.' 



Also, 4. 77, 

' And Sir John Stanley is appointed now 
To take her with him to the Isle of Man.' 

Compare Milton, Sonnet xi. : 

' Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheek, 
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp, . ■ 

When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek.' 

The same generation said poo-nish for punish (a relic of the 
French u in punir) ; and when they spoke of 2^ joint of mutton 
they called it jinte ox jeynt. In some cases it approximated 
to the 'aOMTid.jiveynte, and this was heard in the more retired; 

L 2 



148 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

parts among country gentlemen. This is in fact the missing 
link between the ez or eye sound and the French diphthong 
oz or oi'e — in imitation of which the peculiarity originated. 
The French words /oz 2ind Joz'e are sounded as I'wa and J'wa, 
When the French pronunciation had degenerated so far in 
such words 2js> join, joint, that the was taken no account of, 
and they were uttered as jine, jink, a reaction set in, and 
recourse was had to the native English fashion of pro- 
nouncing the diphthong oi. Hence our present join, joint, 
&c., do not always rhyme where they ought to rhyme, and 
once did rhyme. 

That beautiful verse in the ic6th Psalm (New Version) 
is hardly producible in refined congregations, by reason of 
this change in its closing rhyme : — 

' O may I worthy prove to see 
Thy saints in full prosperity ! 
That I the joyful choir may join, 
And count thy people's triumph mine ! ' 

The fashion has not yet quite passed away of pronouncing 
Rome as the word 7'oo?n is pronounced. This is an ancient 
pronunciation, as is well known from puns in Shakspeare. 
No doubt it is the phantom of an old French pronunciation 
of the name, bearing the same relation to the French Rome 
(pron. JRom) that boon does to the French bon. But what is 
odd about it, is, that in Shakspeare's day the modern pro- 
nunciation (like roam) was already heard and recognised, 
and that the double pronunciation should have gone on till 
now, and it should have taken such a time to establish the 
mastery of the latter. The fact probably is, that the room 
pronunciation has been kept alive in the aristocratic region, 
while the rest of the world has been saying the name as 
it is generally said now. Room is said to have been the 
habitual pronunciation of the late Lord Lansdowne; not 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 49 

to instance living persons. The Shakspearean evidence 
is from the following passages. King John, iii. i : 

' Con. O lawfull let it be 

That I have roome with Rome to curse a while,' 

So also m Julius CcBsar, i. 2. But in i Henry VI, iii. i : 

' Winch. Rome shall remedie this. 
Warw. Roame thither then.' 

There still exist among us a few personages who cul- 
minated under George IV, and who adhere to the now anti- 
quated fashion of their palmy days. With them it used to 
be, and indeed still is, a point of distinction to pronounce 
gold as g07dd or gu-uld ; yellow as y allow ; lilac as leyloc ; 
china as cheyney ; oblige as ohleege, after the Frehch obliger. 

To this group of waning and venerable sounds, which 
were talismans of good breeding in their day, may be added 
the pronunciation of the plural verb are like the word air. 
The following quotation from Wordsworth, Thoughts near 
the Residence of Burns, exhibits it in rhyme with prayer — 
hear — share : — 

' But why to him confine the prayer, 
When kindred thoughts and j^earnings bear 
On the frail heart the purest share 

With all that live? 
The best of what we do and are. 

Just God, forgive ! ' 

Rarer are the instances in which the number of syllables 
has been affected by change of pronunciation. A celebrated 
example is the plural 'aches/ which is thus commented 
upon in Curiosities of Literature, by Isaac Disraeli : — 

' Aches. — Swift's own edition of " The City Shower " has " old a-ches 
throb." Aches is two syllables, but modern printers, who had lost the right 
pronunciation, have aches as one syllable, and then, to complete the metre, 
have foisted in " aches will throb." Thus what the poet and the linguist 
wish to preserve is altered, and finally lost. 



150 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

A good example occurs in Hiidihras, iii. 1, 407, where persons are 
mentioned who 

" Can by their pangs and aches find 
All turns and changes of the wind." 

The rhythm here demands the dissyllable a-ches. as used by the older 
writers, Shakespeare particularly, who, in his Tempest, makes Prospero 
threaten Caliban 

" If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly 
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps ; 
Fill all thy bones with aches ; make thee roar 
That beasts shall tremble at the din." 

John Kemble was aware of the necessity of using this word in this 
instance as a dissyllable, but it Was so unusual to his audiences that it 
excited ridicule; and during the O.P. row, a medal was struck, representing 
him as manager, enduring the din of cat-calls, trumpets, and rattles, and 
exclaiming " Oh ! my head aitches ! " ' 

But for such examples we might be apt to imagine that 
our pronunciation was as fixed as our orthography. These 
and a few more may lead us to observe that when spelling 
ceases to wait on pronunciation it begins to take a sort 
of lead and to draw pronunciation after it. An interesting 
illustration of this may be gathered from the history of 
the word tea. 

We have all heard some village dame talk of her 'dish 
o' tay' ; but the men of our generation are surprised when 
they first learn that this pronunciation of lea is classical 
English, and is enshrined in the verses of Alexander Pope. 
The following rhymes are from the Rape 0/ the Lock. 

' Soft yielding minds to Water gHde away, 
And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea.' (Canto i.) 

* Here thou, great Anna ! whom three realms obey. 
Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes Tea.' (Canto iii.) 

That this was the general pronunciation of good com- 
pany down to the close of the last century there is no 
doubt. The following quotation will carry us to 1775, the 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 151 

date of a poem entitled Bath and Ifs Environs, in three 
cantos, p. 25. 

' Muse o'er some book, or trifle o'er the tea, 
Or with soft musick charm dull care away.' 

This old pronunciation was borrowed with the word from 
the French, who still call the Chinese beverage tay, and 
write it the. Our present pronunciation has resulted from 
an important movement in the phonetic signification of 
EA. There is now only one acknowledged value of ea; 
but formerly there were two. A change has gradually crept 
over certain words that had ea, sounding like ay. These 
have mostly (but not entirely) been assimilated to the more 
numerous instances in which ea sounds like ee or e. It 
is certain that when tea was introduced into England by 
the name of tay, it seemed natural to represent that sound 
by the letters t, e, a. 

Although there are a great many words in English which 
hold the diphthong ea, as beat, dear, death, eat, fear, gear, 
head, learn, mean, neat, pear, read, seat, teat, wean, — yet the 
cases of ea ending an English word are very few. Ben 
Jonson, in his day, having produced four of them, viz. flea, 
plea, sea, yea, added, ' and you have at one view all our words 
of this termination.' He forgot the word lea, or perhaps 
regarded it as a bad spelling for ley or lay. This makes five. 
A sixth, pea, has come into existence since. It is a mere 
creature of grammar, a singular begotten of the young 
plural pease. In the sixteenth century pease was singular, and 
peason or peasen was plural, as we see in the following 
passages from Surrey : — • 

' All men might well dispraise 
My wit and enterprise. 
If I esteemed a pease 
Above a pearl in price.' 



I 



152 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION, 

' Tickle treasure, abhorred of reason, 
Dangerous to deal with, vain, of none avail ; 
Costly in keeping, past not worth two peason ; 
Slipper in sliding, as is an eeles tail.' 

To these there has been added a sixth, viz. Tea. 

At the time when this orthography of tea was determined, 
it is certain that most instances of ea final sounded as ay, 
and probable that all did. In a large number of words with 
EA internal, the pronunciation had long been different. But 
even in these cases there is room to suspect that the ay 
sound was once general, if not universal. We still give it the 
AY sound in measure, pleasure^ treasure : where ea, though 
in the midst of a word, is at the close of a syllable. But 
there are cases in which it is still so sounded in the middle 
of a syllable, as it is in great and break. 

In Surrey we find heat rhyme to great, and no doubt it 
was a true rhyme. Surrey pronounced heat as the majority 
of our countrymen, at least in the west country, still do, viz. 
as hayt. The same poet rhymes ease to assays : — 

' The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays ; 
The ship-boy, and the galley-slave, have time to take their ease ; ' — 

where it is plain that ease still kept to the French sound of 
aise. Then, further, the same poet has in a sonnet, the 
following run of rhyming words : — 

ease'j 

misease ( 

please ( 

days J 

which renders it tolerably plain, that please was pronounced 
as the French plaise, as it still is pronounced by the majority 
of EngUsh people. 

These investigations suggest many questions as to the 
alterations that our pronunciation may have undergone. 
For instance, did Abraham Cowley pronounce cheat as we 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 153 

often hear it in our own day, viz. as chayt ? He has the 
following rhyme : — 

' If e'er ambition did my fancy cheat 
With any wish so mean as to be great.' 

And how did Milton sound the rhymes of this couplet in the 
L' Allegro ? — 

' With stories told of many a feat, 
How fairy Mab the junkets eat.' 

Must we not suppose that eat being in the preterite, and 
equivalent to ate, had a sound unlike our present pronuncia- 
tion oi/eat. And if so, the derivation of the word from the 
French/"^//, suggests the soundsy^v'/ and ayt. 

Dr. Watts (1709) rhymes sea to away. Sir Roundell 
Palmer's Book 0/ Praise, clxi: — 

' But timorous mortals start and shrink 
To cross this narrow sea. 
And linger shivering on the brink, 
And fear to launch away.' 

Goldsmith, in The Haunch of Venison, puts this pronuncia- 
tion into the mouth of an under-bred fine-spoken fellow : — 

' An under- bred fine-spoken fellow was he, 
And he smil'd as he look'd on the venison and me. 
"What have we got here? — Why this is good eating I 
Your own, I suppose — or is it in wailing ? " ' 

However we may be puzzled to account for the letters ea 
being used to represent the sound of ay, there can be no 
dispute about the fact; and it removes the wonder of the 
orthography of the word tea pronounced lay. It also throws 
light upon a passage in Shakspeare, i Henry IV, ii. 3, where 
Falstaif says ' if Reasons were as plentie as Black-berries, 
I would giue no man a Reason vpon compulsion, I.' It 
seems that half a pun underlies this; the association of 
reasons with blackberries springing out of the fact that 



154 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

reasojts sounded like raisi7ts. In the analogous word season, 
we have ea substituted for the older ay ; for, in the fifteenth 
century, Lydgate wrote this word saysoun and saysonne. 
When we look at the word treason, and consider its relation 
to the French trahison, who can suppose that the pronun- 
ciation treeson is anything but a modernism ? 

In The Stage-Players Complaint (1641), we find nay spelt 
nea : ' Nea you know this well enough, but onely you love 
to be inquisitive.' 

When, in 1765, Josiah Wedgwood, having received his 
first order from Queen Charlotte, wrote to get some help 
from a relative in London, he described the Hst of tea things 
which were ordered, and he spelt the word tray thus, ' trea ' 
— for so only can we understand it — ' Teapot & stand, 
spoon-trea.' The orthography may be either his own or 
that of Miss Chetwynd, from whom the instructions came \ 

It is not unlikely that this use of ea runs back into Saxon 
times. It was one of the most frequent and characteristic 
of Saxon diphthongs. But when we come to Chaucer we 
hardly find it at all. There may be a doubtful reading of 
death for deth in the Knight's Tale ; and there are the cases 
in which the e and a stand contiguous, but in different syl- 
lables, as in creature, piirveaunce, Scythea. But speaking 
broadly, ea has disappeared in Chaucer's English. This 
is more forcible than fists of words to indicate the deep 
effect which the French language had taken on ours. The 
Saxon tear is in Chaucer ' teer ' or ' tere ' ; yar is ' yeer ' or 
' yere,' and so on. It matters not that later there was 
a return to the spelling tear 2ind year, when we had for ever 
lost what that spelling represented ; for though we now 
write tear, year, we sa}' teer, yeer. 



Life of Josiah Wedgwood by E',i/.a Meteyard (1865"), vol. i. p. 371. 






SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. J 55 

But while commixture with French had aboHshed this old 
diphthongal sound in the centre of English society, we may 
be sure it lived on provincially. And a few traces may be 
collected which seem to indicate that it grew towards the 
sound Ai or ay. Thus the Saxon ceaster has produced 
Caistor and Caystor, The Saxon word ea = water, has pro- 
duced Eaton, it must be admitted, and Eton in the more 
central neighbourhoods, but in remoter regions also Aytoun ; 
and the Saxon numeral eahta is pronounced ayt and written 
eight. 

From Elizabeth's time onward there was a gradual re- 
admission of this diphthong in a few words with the sound 
of AY, as the above examples shew. 

In further illustration we may quote from Michael Dray- 
ton's Polyolbion, xixth song (1662) : — 

' Foure such Immeasur'd Pooles, Phylosophers agree, 
Ith foure parts of the world undoubtedly to bee ; 
From which they haue supposd, Nature the winds doth raise. 
And from them to proceed the flowing of the Seas.' 

Family names offer some examples to the same effect. 
A friend informs me that he had once a relative, who in 
writing was Mr. Lea, but he pronounced his name ' Lay ' : 
and I am courteously permitted to use for illustration the 
name of Mr. Rea, of Newcastle, the well-known organist, 
whose family tradition renders the name as ' Ray/ 

If it has been made plain that ea sounded ay in many 
cases, it will be a step to the clearing of another anomaly. 
It has been asked why we spell conceive with ei, and yet spell 
believe, reprieve., &c., v/ith ie ? The difficulty lies in this fact — 
that the pronunciation of these dissimilar diphthongs is the 
same. And the answer lies in this — that the pronunciation 
was different. Those words which we now write with ei, 
to wit, deceive., perceiv^e, co?iceive, receive ^ were all pronounced 



156 SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 

with a -caj've sound, as they still are in many localities. The 
readiest proof of this is in the facts, (i) that you will not 
find them rhymed with words of the z'e type, and (2) that 
you will continually find them spelt with ea, as deceave, per- 
ceave, conceave, receave. 

In a fac-simile letter of Edward Hyde, the first Earl of 
Clarendon (b. 16 18, d. 1674), he writes receaued and per- 
ceaue, where we should spell received and perceive. Fac- 
similes of private letters are of excellent use ki these 
investigations, because they supply us with the evidence 
of independent ears. At an early date, certainly as. early 
as 161 1, the printers had taken spelling into their hands, 
and a professional orthography was forming. This weakens 
the evidence of printed books and enhances the value of 
private letters. In the Bible of 1611 these verbs are 
all spelt -ceive. So in the First Folio of Shakspeare, 1623. 
But we find abundant proof, both before and after these 
dates, that -ceave seemed the most natural way to represent 
the sound. But in fact the two spellings confirm each 
other as evidence to this, that the sound was -cayve. For 
what the printers meant by their ei was doubtless the sound 
ay. On the other hand when ie was introduced, as in the 
spelling of believe, it meant the sound now understood. 
This may be gathered from the quotation of the Bible of 
1 6 1 1 in the early part of this chapt'er. 

There is at least one word which still vacillates between 
the two sounds of ea, and that is the word break : 

' Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break 
Although it chill my withered cheek ' Scott. 

' Ah, his eyelids slowly break 
Their hot seals, and let him wake ! ' Matthew Arnold. 

That the latter is /he pronunciation at the present time, I 
there can be no doubt : and yet the former is heard from j 



SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION. 1 57 

SO many persons who are able to read and write, that it may 
perhaps establish itself in the end. 

In summing up the case of Spelling and Pronunciation, 
we may again make use of the famous example of tea. 
When this word was first spelt, the letters came at the call 
of the sound : the spelling followed the pronunciation. 
But since that time, the letters having changed their value, 
the sound of the word has shared the vicissitude of its 
letters : the pronunciation has followed the spelling. It is 
manifest that these movements have one and the same aim, 
namely, to make the spelling phonetically symbolise the 
pronunciation. But there are two great obstacles to such 
a consummation: (i) The letters of the alphabet are too 
few to represent all the variety of simple sounds in the 
English language ; (2) But even what they might do is not 
done, because of the restraining hand of traditional asso- 
ciation. The consequence is, that when we use the word 
' orthography,' we do not mean a mode of spelling which 
is true to the pronunciation, but one which is conventionally 
correct. 



CHAPTER III. 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 

The term interjection signifies something that is pitched in 
among things of which it does not naturally form a con- 
stituent part. The name has been given it by grammarians, 
in order to express its relation to grammatical structures. 
It is found in them, but it forms no part of them. 

The interjection may be defined as a form of speech 
which is articulate but not grammatical. 

An interjection implies a meaning which it would require 
a whole grammatical sentence to expound, and it may be 
regarded as the rudiment of such a sentence. But it is 
a confusion of thought to rank it among the parts of speech. 
It is not in any sense a part; it is a whole (though an 
indistinct) expression of feeling or of thought. An inter- 
jection bears to its context the same sort of relation as 
a pictorial illustration does. 

It may stand either insulated in the sentence, or con- 
nected with it by a preposition, as — 

' Oh for a humbler heart and prouder song !' 

We rightly call an adjective or an adverb a part of speech, 
because these have no meaning by themselves without the 
aid of nouns and verbs, and because their very designation 



1 



CF INTERJECTIONS. I59 

implies the existence of nouns and verbs. But an interjec- 
tion is intelligible without any grarnmatical adjunct; and 
such completeness as it is capable of is obtained without 
any external assistance. 

Ancient grammarians ranked the interjections as adverbs, 
but the moderns have made them a separate class. If 
it were a question to which of the parts of speech the 
interjection is most cognate, it must be answered to the 
verb. For if we take any simple interjection, such as, for 
example, the cry ' Oh, Oh ! ' in the House of Commons, 
and translate it into plain English, it can only be done by 
a verb, either in the imperative or in the indicative first per- 
son. Either you must say it is equivalent to ' Don't say 
such things,' or else to ' I doubt,' ' I wonder,' ' I demur,' 
' I dispute,' ' I deny,' ' I protest,' &c. ; by one or more of 
these or such verbs must ' Oh, Oh ! ' be explained ; and if it 
must be classed among parts of speech at all, it should count 
as a rudimentary verb. 

It is from that germ of verbal activity which is innate in 
the interjection, that it adapts itself readily to perform the 
office of a conjunction. It has this peculiar faculty as a 
conjunction, that it rounds off and renders natural an abrupt 
beginning, and forms as it were the bridge between the 
spoken and the unspoken : 

' Oh if in aft^ life we could but gather 
The very refuse of our youthful hours ! ' Charles Lloyd. 

It is because of this variety of possible meanings in the 
interjection that writing is less able to represent interjections 
than to express grammatical language. Even in the latter, 
writing is but an imperfect medium, because it fails to con- 
vey the accompaniments, such as the look, the tone, the 
emphasis, the gesture. This defect is more evident in the 
case of interjections, where the written word is but a very 



l6o . OF INTERJECTIONS. 

small part of the expression ; and the manner, tone, 
gesture, &c., is nearly everything. 

Hence also it comes to pass that the interjection is of all 
that is printed the most difficult thing to read well aloud. 
For not only does it require a rare command of modulation ; 
but the reader has moreover to be perfectly acquainted 
with the situation and temperament of the person using 
the interjection. Shakspeare's interjections cannot be ren- 
dered with any truth, except by one who has mastered the 
whole play. 

In the accompaniments lies the rhetoric of the interjec- 
tion, which is used with astonishing effect by children and 
savages. For it is to these that the interjection more es- 
pecially belongs, and in proportion to the march of culture 
is the decline of interjectional speech. 

But though the use of interjections is very much reduced 
by civilisation, and though there are whole fields of litera- 
ture from which they are utterly banished, as History, 
Mathematics, Physical Science, — yet they have a sphere in 
which they are retained, and in this, the literature of the 
emotions, their importance will always be considerable. It 
should moreover be added, that while most of the natural 
accompaniments of interjectional speech, such as gestures, 
grimaces, and gesticulations, are restrained by civilisation, 
there yet remains one, which alone is. able to render justice 
to the interjection, and which culture tends to improve and 
develope, and that is, modulation. It is this which makes 
it well worth a poet's while to throw meaning into his 
interjections. 

Moreover, though it is true on the whole that interjectional 
communications are restrained by civilisation ; yet it is also 
to be noted on the other hand, that there are certain inter- 
jections which are the fruits of, and only fit to find a place 



OF INTERJECTIONS. l6l 

in, the highest and most mature forms of human culture. 
And this chapter will naturally follow this important division, 
and fall into the two heads, of (i) interjections of nature, or 
primitive interjections ; and (2) artificial or historical interjec- 
tions. The distinction between these sorts will be generally 
this, — that the latter have a philological derivation^ and the 
former have not. 

Of the natural interjections, that which challenges the first 
mention is — 

O ; oh ! This is well known as one of the earliest articu- 
lations of infants, to express surprise or delight. Later in 
life it comes to indicate also fear, aspiration, appeal, and an 
indefinite variety of emotions. It would almost seem that 
in proportion as the spontaneous modulation of the voice 
comes to perfection, in the same degree the range of this 
most generic of all interjections becomes enlarged, and that 
according to the tone in which oh is uttered, it may be 
understood to mean almost any one of the emotions of 
which humanity is capable. 

This interjection owes its great predominance to the 
influence of the Latin language, in which it was very fre- 
quently used. And there is one particular use of it, which 
more especially bears a Latin stamp. That is the of the 
vocative case, as when in prayers, for instance, we say 
Loi'd, &c. ; O Thou to whom all creatures bow, &c. 

A distinction should be made in orthography between the 
sign of the vocative, and the emotional interjection, writing 
for the former, and oh for the latter, as — 

' O Nature, how in every charm supreme !' 

Beattie, Minstrel, Bk. i. 

' But she is in her grave, — and ob 

The difference to me!' Wordsworth. 

' Like — but oh, how different ! ' Id, 

M 



l62 OF INTERJECTIONS, 

This distinction of spelling should by all means be kept 
up, as it is based upon good ground. There is a difference 
between 'O sir!' 'O king!' and *0h! sir/ 'Oh! Lord/ 
both in sense and pronunciation. 

As to the sense : the prefixed merely imparts to the 
title a vocative effect; while the Ok conveys some parti- 
cular sentiment, as of appeal, entreaty, expostulation, or 
some other. 

And as to sound: the is an enclitic; that is to say, it 
has no accent of its own, but is pronounced with the word 
to which it is attached, as if it were its unaccented first 
syllable. The term 'enclitic' signifies reclining on, and so 
the interjection in ' O Lord ' reclines on the support 
afforded to it by the accentual elevation of the word ' Lord.' 
So that ' O Lord ' is pronounced like such a disyllable a& 
alight, alike, away, &c., in which words the metrical stress 
could never be borne by the first syllable. Oh ! on the con- 
trary, is one of the fullest of monosyllables, and it would be 
hard to place it in a verse except with the stress upon it. 
The above examples from Beattie and Wordsworth illustrate 
this. 

Precedence has been given to the interjection oh, because 
it is the commonest of the simple or natural interjections,— 
not that it is one of the longest standing in the language. 

The oldest interjections in our language are la and wa, 
and each of these merits a separate notice. 

La is that interjection which in modern English is spelt 
lo. It was used in Saxon times, both as an emotional cry, 
and also as a sign of the respectful vocative. The most 
reverential style in addressing a superior was La leof, an 
expression not easy to render in modern English, but which 
is something like my liege, or my lord, or sir. 

In modern times it has taken the form of lo in literature, 



OF INTERSECTIONS, 1 63 

and it has been supposed to have something to do with the 
verb fo look. In this sense it has been used in the New 
Testament to render the Greek l8ov that is, hehold ! But the 
interjection la was quite independent of another Saxon 
exclamation, viz. loc, which may with more probability be 
associated with locian = to look. 

The fact seems to be that the modern lo represents both 
the Saxon interjections la and /oc, and that this is one among 
many instances where two Saxon words have been merged 
into a single English one. 

' Lo, how they feignen chalk for chese.' 

Gower, Confessio Amantis, vol. i. p. 17, ed. Pauli. 

The la of Saxon times has none of the indicatory or 
pointing force which lo now has, and which fits it to go so 
naturally with an adverb of locality, as ' Lo here,' or ' Lo 
there ' ; or 

' Lo ! where the stripling, wrapt in wonder, roves.' 

Beattie, Minstrel, Bk. i. 

But while lo became the literary form of the word, la has 
still continued to exist more obscurely, at least down to a 
recent date, even if it be not still in use. La may be called 
the feminine form of lo. In novels of the close of last 
century and the beginning of this, we see la occurring for 
the most part as a trivial exclamation by the female 
characters. 

In Miss Edgeworth's tale of The Good French Governess, 
a silly affected boarding-school miss says la repeatedly : — 

' '• La ! " said Miss Fanshaw, " we had no such book as this at Suxberry 
House." 

Miss Fanshaw, to shew how well she could walk, crossed the room, and 
took up one of the books. 

"Alison upon Taste — that's a pretty book, I daresay — hut la I what's 
this. Miss Isabella ? A Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments — dear me ! 
that must be a curious performance — by a smith ! a common smith ! " ' 



164 OF INTERJECTIONS. 

And in The Election : a Comedy, by Joanna Baillie (1798), 
Act ii. Sc. I, Charlotte thus soliloquises : — 

' Charlotte. La, how I should like to be a queen, and stand in my robes, 
and have all the people introduced to me ! ' 

And when Charles compares her cheeks to the 'pretty- 
delicate damask rose/ she exclaims : ' La, now you are 
flattering me.' 

And to shew that this trivial little interjection is traceable 
back to early times, and that it is one with the old Saxon la, 
we may cite the authority of Shakspeare in the mid interval, 
who, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, puts this exclamation 
into the mouths of Master Slender first, and of Mistress 
Quickly afterwards. 

' Slen. Mistris Anne : your selfe shall goe first. 

Atine. Not I sir, pray you keepe on. 

Slen. Truely, I will not goe first : truely la ; I will not doe you that 
wrong. 

Anne. I pray you Sir, 

Sleit. He rather be vnmannerly, then troublesome : you doe your selfe 
wrong indeede-la.' (Act i. Sc. i.) 

Here the interjection seems to retain somewhat of its old 
ceremonial significance : but when, in the ensuing scene, 
Mistress Quickly says, 'This is all indeede— la : but ile nere 
put my finger in the fire, and neede not,' there is nothing in 
it but the merest expletive. 

Wa has a history much like that of la. It has changed 
its form in modern Enghsh to wo. ' Wo,' in the New Tes- 
tament, as Rev. viii. 13, stands for the Greek interjection 
oval and the Latin vce. In the same way it is used in many 
passages in which the interjectional character is distinct. 
This word must be distinguished from woe, which is a sub- 
stantive. For instance, in the phrase ' weal and woe.' And 
in such scriptures as Prov. xxiii. 29 : ' Who hath woe ? 
who hath sorrow .? ' 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 1 65 

The fact is, that there were here absorbed two distinct 
old words, namely, the interjection wa and the substantive 
wok (genitive wages), which means depravity, wickedness, 
misery. And it would be convenient to observe the dis- 
tinction, which still is practically valid, by a distinct ortho- 
graphy, writing the interjection wo, and the substantive woe. 

This interjection was compounded with the previous one 
into the form wala or walawa — an exclamation which is 
several times found in Chaucer, and which, before it dis- 
appeared, was modified into the feebler form of wellaway. 
A degenerate variety of this form was well~a-day. Woeful 
cries have a certain disposition to implicate the present 
time, as in woe worth the day ! 

There was yet another compound interjection made with 
la by prefixing the interjection ea. Hence the Saxon com- 
pound eala. This occurs often in the Saxon Gospels as 
a mere sign of the vocative ; for example, ' Eala ]?u wif, 
mycel ys ])in geleafa' (O woman, great is thy faith). 
Matt. XV. 28. 'Eala faeder Abraham, gemiltsa me' (Father 
Abraham, pity me), Luke xvi. 24. 

This eala may be regarded as the stock on which the 
French he'las was grafted, and from the conjunction with 
which sprung the modern alas, which appears in English 
of the thirteenth century, as in Robert of Gloucester, 4198 : 
' Alas ! alas ! ]jou wrecche mon, wuch mysaventure ha]> J>e 
ybrogt in to ]?ys stede.' (Alas ! alas ! thou wretched man, 
what misadventure hath brought thee into this place ?) And 
in Chaucer it is a frequent interjection. In a pathetic 
passage of the Knighfs Tale it is used repeatedly. 

'Alias the wo, alias the peynes stronge, 
That I for yow haue sufFred, and so longe ; 
Alias the deeth, alias myn Emelye, 
Alias departynge of our compaignye. 
Alias myn hertes queene, alias ray wyf, 
Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf.' 



1 66 OF INTERJECTIONS. 

Alack seems to be the more genuine representation of 
eala, which, escaping the influence of /lehs, drew after it 
(or preserved rather ?) the final guttural so congenial to the 
interjection. Thus the modern alack suggests a Saxon or 
Anglian form eahh. This interjection has rather a trivial 
use in the south of England, and we do not find it used 
with a dignity equal to that of alas, until by Sir Walter Scott 
the language of Scotland was brought into one literature 
with our own. Jeanie Deans cries out before the tribunal 
at the most painful crisis of the trial : ' Alack a-day ! she 
never told me.' Still, the word is on the whole associated 
mainly with trivial occasions, and in this connection of ideas 
it has engendered the adjective lackadaysical, to characterise 
a person who flies into ecstasies too readily. 

Pooh seems connected with the French exclamation of 
physical disgust : Pouah, quelle infection I But our pooh 
expresses an analogous moral sentiment : * Pooh ! pooh ! 
it 's all stuff" and nonsense.' 

Psha expresses contempt. ' Doubt is always crying psha 
and sneering.' — Thackeray, Humourists, p. 69. 

Heigh ho. Some interjections have so vague, so filmy 
a meaning, that it would take a great many words to inter- 
pret what their meaning is. They seem as fitted to be the 
echo of one thought or feeling as another ; or even to be no 
more than a mere melodious continuation of the rhythm : — 

' How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho ! 
How pleasant it is to have money.' 

Arthur H. Clough. 

This will suffice to exhibit the nature of the first class of 
interjections; — those which stand nearest to nature and 
farthest from art ; those which owe least to conventionality 
and most to genuine emotion ; those which are least capable 
of orthographic expression and most dependent upon oral 



OF INTERJECTIONS. l6j 

modulation. It is to this class of interjections especially 
that the following quotation is applicable. 

' The dominion of speech is erected upon the downfall of interjections : 
without the artful contrivances of language, mankind would have had 
nothing but interjections with which to communicate orally any of their 
feelings. The neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the barking of 
a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, coughing, groaning, shrieking, and 
every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, have almost as good 
a title to be called parts of speech, as interjections have. Voluntary inter- 
jections are only employed when the suddenness and vehemence of some 
affection or passion returns men to their natural state, and makes them for 
a moment forget the use of speech ; or when from some circumstance the 
shortness of time will not permit them to exercise it.' — Home Tooke, 
Diversions of Parley, p. 32. 

The interjections which we have been considering so far, 
may be called the spontaneous or primitive interjections, and 
they are such as have no basis in grammatical forms. 

But we now pass on to the other group, which may be 
called the artificial or secondary interjections; a group 
which, though extra-grammatical no less than the former, 
in the sense that they do not enter into any grammatical 
construction, are yet founded upon grammatical words. 
Verbs, nouns, participles, adjectives, have by use lost their 
grammatical character, and have lapsed into the state of 
interjections. 

In the nascency of geological ideas, a controversy flourished 
upon this question: — Whether fossils in the semblance of 
animal organisms were things that once had lived, or 
whether they were only lapides sui generis, a strange sort of 
stones? Not very unlike is the question that might be 
raised concerning the interjections we are now to consider. 
Are they parts of organised speech, or are they interjections 
that form a class by themselves .? They bear internal marks 
of organism, but their organs have ceased to be functional. 
We must be content to play the part of those wise men who 
pronounced the fossils to be but stones, and we must treat 
these words as mere interjectional missiles. 



1 68 OF INTERJECTIONS, 

Our first example shall be borrowed from the manners and 
customs of the British parliament. That scene may fairly 
be regarded as the most mature and full-grown exhibition 
of the powers of human speech, and yet it is there also 
that one of the most famous of interjections first originated, 
and is in constant employment. The cry of ' Hear, hear,' 
originally an imperative verb, is now nothing more nor less 
than a great historical interjection. The following is the 
history of the exclamation, as described by Lord Macaulay, 
History of England, ch. xi. (1689). 

' The King therefore, on the fifth day after he had been proclaimed, went 
with royal state to the House of Lords, and took his seat on the throne. 
The Commons were called in ; and he, with many gracious expressions, 
reminded his hearers of the perilous situation of the country, and exhorted 
them to take such steps as might prevent unnecessary delay in the trans- 
action of public business. His speech was received by the gentlemen who 
crowded the bar with the deep hum by which our ancestors were wont to 
indicate approbation, and which was often heard in places more sacred than 
the Chamber of the Peers. As soon as he had retired, a Bill, declaring the 
Convention a Parliament, was laid on the table of the Lords, and rapidly 
passed by them. In the Commons the debates were warm. The House 
resolved itself into a Committee; and so great was the excitement, that, when 
the authority of the Speaker was withdrawn, it was hardly possible to pre- 
serve order. Sharp personalities were exchanged. The phrase " hear him," 
a phrase which had originally been used only to silence irregular noises, and 
to remind members of the duty of attending to the discussion, had, during 
some years, been gradually becoming what it now is ; that is to say, a cry 
indicative, according to the tone, of admiration, acquiescence, indignation, or 
derision.' 

The historian could not have chosen more suitable words 
had it been his intention to describe the transition of a 
grammatical part of speech into the condition of an inter- 
jectional symbol, whose signification depends on the tone in 
which it is uttered. The fact is, that when a large assembly 
is animated with a common sentiment which demands in- 
stantaneous utterance, it can find that utterance only through 
interjections. A crowd of grown men is here in the same 
condition as the infant, and must speak in those forms to 
which expression is imparted only by variety of tone. 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 1 69 

The Liturgy, when it was in Latin, was a prolific source 
for the minting of popular interjections. Where vernacular 
words are changed into interjections, some plain reason 
for their selection may generally be found in the gram- 
matical sense of such words. But where a Latin word 
of religion came to be popular as an exclamation, it 
was as likely to be the sound as the sense that gave it 
currency. In the fourteenth century, BEisrEDiciTE had this 
sort of career; and it does not appear how it could have 
been other than a senseless exclamation from the first. It 
often occurs in Chaucer, as in the following from the 
Knighfs Tale, 2 no: 

' For if ther fille tomorwe swich a caas ; 
Ye knowen wel J)at euery lusty knyght, 
That loueth paramours and hath his myght ; 
Were it in Engelond or elles where, 
They wolde hir thankes wilnen to be there — 
To fighte for a lady, benedicitee 1 
It were a lusty sighte for to see.' 

And not only is it true that interjections are formed out 
of grammatical words, but also it is further true, that certain 
grammatical words may stand as interjections in an 
occasional way, without permanently changing their nature. 
This chiefly appHes to some of the more conventional col- 
loquialisms. Perhaps there is not a purer or a more con- 
densed interjection in English literature, than that indeed 
in Othello, Act iii. Sc. 3. It contains in it the gist of the 
chief action of the play, and it implies all that the plot 
developes. It ought to be spoken with such an intonation 
as to suggest the diabolic scheme of lago's conduct. There 
is no thought of the grammatical structure of the compound, 
consisting of the preposition in and the substantive deed, 
which is equivalent to act, fact, or reality. All this vanishes 
and is lost in the mere iambic dissyllable which is employed 
as a vehicle for the feigned tones of surprise. 



170 OF INTERJECTIONS. 

'lago. I did not thinke he had bin acquainted with hir. 

0th. O yes, and went betweene vs very oft. 

lago. Indeed ! 

0th. Indeed? I indeed. Discern'st thou ought in that? Is he 
not honest ? 

lago. Honest, my lord? 

0th. Honest? I, honest!' 

Thus Strong passion may so scorch up, as it were, the 
organism of a word, that it ceases to have any of that 
grammatical quality which the calm light of the mind ap- 
preciates ; and it becomes, for the nonce, an interjection. 

And not only passion, but ignorance may do the like. 
With uneducated persons, their customary words and 
phrases grow to be very like interjections, especially those 
phrases which are peculiar to and traditional in the 
vocation they follow. When a porter at a railway-station 
cries by'b leave, he may understand the analysis of the 
words he uses; and then he is speaking logically and 
grammatically, though elliptically. If he does not under- 
stand the construction of the phrase he uses, and if 
he is quite ignorant how much is implied and left un- 
said, he merely uses a conventional cry as an interjec- 
tion. And we need not doubt that this is the case in 
those instances where we hear it uttered as follows: 'By'r 
leave, if you please ! ' It is plain in this instance that the 
speaker understands the latter clause, but does not under- 
stand the former — for, if he did, he would feel the latter to 
be superfluous. A cry of this sort, uttered as a conglomerate 
whole, where the mind makes no analysis, is, as far as the 
speaker is concerned, an interjection. 

But when we speak of ignorance, we use, of course, 
a relative term. Some few know a little more than the 
average ; but even with the best informed the limit of 
knowledge is never far distant. A gentleman who has 
enjoyed the benefits of a grammatical education, may 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 171 

possibly find himself in a like case with the railway porter. 
For, as soon as a man travels beyond the limits of his own 
linguistic acquirements, he will find himself driven to use the 
strange words of the strange tongue in an interjectional 
manner. In the following quotation we have an instance 
of a gentleman using two well-known French words in an 
interjectional manner, because he had not the learning which 
would have enabled him to use them more intelligently. 

' " Do you speak the language ? " said one of the young listeners, with 
a smile which was very awkwardly repressed. " Oh, no ! " replied the well- 
fed gentleman, laughing good naturedly ; " I know nothing of their lan- 
guage. I pay for all I eat, and I find, by paying, I can get anything I want. 
Mangez ! CHANGEZ ! is quite foreign language enough, sir, for me;" and 
having to the first word suited his action, by pointing with his forefinger to 
his mouth ; and to explain the second, having rubbed his thumb against the 
selfsame finger, as if it were counting out money, he joined the roar of 
laughter which his two French words had caused, and then very good- 
naturedly paced the deck by himself.' — Bubbles from the Brunnens of 
Nassau, by An Old Man, 2nd edit., Murray, 1 834, p. 17. 

In this instance, mangez and changez are essentially inter- 
jections. 

Fudge. Isaac Disraeli, in his Curiosities of Literature^ 
vol. iii., quotes a pamphlet entitled Remarks upon the Navy, 
of the date 1700, to shew that this interjection has sprung 
from a man's name. 

' There was, sir, in our time, one Captain Fudge, commander of a mer- 
chantman, who, upon his return from a voyage, how ill-fraught soever his 
ship was, always brought home his owners a good cargo of lies ; so much 
that now aboard ship, the sailors, when they hear a great lie told, cry out, 
" You fudge it." ' 

Mr. DisraeH adds, but without references, what is of great 
use for the illustration of this section. He says ' that recently 
at the bar, in a court of law, its precise meaning perplexed 
plaintiff and defendant, and their counsel.' It is of the very 
nature of an interjection, that it eludes the meshes of a 
definition. 

It was Goldsmith who first gave this interjection a literary 



172 OF INTERJECTIONS. 

currency. Mr. Forster, in Oliver Goldsmith's Life and Times, 
speaking of The Vicar of Wakefield, has the following : — 

' There never was a book in which indulgence and charity made virtue 
look so lustrous. Nobody is strait-laced ; if we except Miss Carolina Wil- 
helmina Amelia Skeggs, whose pretensions are summed up in Burchell's 
noble monosyllable. 

" Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price ; but where 
is that to be found ? " 

*' Fudge." ' 

Hail. Here we have the case of an adjective which 
has become an interjection. It is a very old salutation, 
being found not only in Anglo-Saxon, but also in Old 
High Dutch. In the early examples it always appears gram- 
matically as an adjective of health joined with the verb to 
he in the imperative. In the Saxon Version of the Gospels, 
Luke i. 28, 'Hal W3es ^u' = 'Hale be thou!* and in the 
plural, Matt, xxviii. 9, ' Hale wese ge ' = ' Hale be ye ! 

And so still in Layamon's Brut (vol. iii. p. 162) where 
the variety of spelling is observable : 

' Hail seo J)u Gurgmund ; 
hal seo ]yu haSene king, 
heil seo J)in du3e'5e ; 
hail ];ine drihtliche men.' 

Which Sir Frederic Madden thus renders : — 

• Hail be thou, Gurmund ; hail be thou, heathen king. Hail be thy folk, 
hail thy noble men ! ' 

In the same poem (vol. iii. p. 144) we meet all hail in 
a purely adjectival signification : 

' & hev seal mine wunden 
makien alle isunde ; 
al hal me makien 
mid halewei5e drenchen.' 

* And she shall make my wounds all sound ; make me all whole with 
healing draughts.' 

By the sixteenth century this ' all hail ! ' had become a 



I 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 1 73 

worshipful salutation, and having lost all construction, was 
completely interjectionalised. 

' Did they not sometime cry All hayle to me ? ' 

Shakspeare, Richard II. iv. I . 

The pronunciation is iambic; the All being enclitic, and 
the stress on hayle^ as if the whole were a disyllabic. We 
sometimes hear it otherwise rendered in Matthew xxviii. 9, 
as if All meant omnes, Travres ; instead of being merely ad- 
verbial, omm'no, irdpTios. It does not indeed represent any 
separate word at all, the original being simply Xaipere. In 
the Vulgate it is Avele ; and this is rendered by WicM Hez'l 
y. Tyndal was the first who introduced this All hayle into 
the English version. The Geneva translators substituted for 
it God saue you. 

Other instances of the use of this form of greeting in our 
New Testament are too well known to need quotation. 
This section shall close with the following example from 
a dialogue poem of Cowper, good also for its illustration of 
another interjection : — 

' Distorted from its use and just design, 
To make the pitiful possessor shine, 
To purchase, at the fool-frequented fair 

Of vanity, a wreath for self to wear, ' 

Is profanation of the basest kind — 
Proof of a trifling and a worthless mind. 

A. Hail Sternhold, then; and Hopkins, hail. B. Amen. 
If flattery, folly, lust, employ the pen; 
If acrimony, slander, and abuse, 
Give it a charge to blacken and traduce : 
Though Butler's wit, Pope's numbers, Prior's ease, 
With all that fancy can invent to please, 
Adorn the polish'd periods as they fall — 
One madrigal of theirs is worth them all ! ' Table Talk. 

This brings us to the example which holds the most con- 
spicuous historical position, the great congregational inter- 
jection of faith, the universal response of the Christian 



174 0^ INTERJECTIONS. 

Church as well as of the Hebrew Synagogue, AMEN. 
This word, at first in Hebrew a verbal adjective, and thence 
an affirmative adverb, signifying verily, truly, yea, was used 
in the earfiest times of the Jewish Church (Deut. xxvii. 15; 
Ps. xH. 14, Ixxii. 19, Ixxxix: 53) for the people's response: 
* and let all the people say Amen/ It was continued from 
the first in the Christian community, as we know from 
I Cor. xiv. 16, and is still in use in every body of Christians. 
For the most part it has been preserved in its original 
Hebrew form of Amen; but the French Protestants have 
substituted for it a translation in the vulgar tongue, and they 
do not respond with Amen but with Ainsi-soif-il = So be it^. 
They have by this change limited this ancient interjection 
to one of its several functions. For in this modern form it 
is only adapted to be a response to prayer, or the expression 
of some desire. 

There are other sorts of assent and affirmation for which 
Amen is serviceable, besides that single one of desire or as- 
piration. In mediaeval wills it was put at the head of the 
document In the name of God AMEN. This was a pro- 
testation of earnestness on the part of the testator, and 
a claim on all whom it might concern to respect his dis- 
positions. 

In Jeremiah xxviii. 6 we find one AMEN delivered by the 
prophet with the wishful meaning only, while there is an 
ominous reserve of assent. 

In the Commination Service, the Amiens to the denuncia- 
tions are not expressions of desire that evil may overtake the 
wicked, but the solemn acknowledgment of a liability to 
which they are subject. As the preliminary instruction sets 



"^ 1 am informed that the Freemasons have a time-honoured rendering of 
their own : So mote it he I 



OF INTERJECTIONS. 1 75 

forth the intent wherefore ' ye should answer to every sen- 
tence, Amen! In this place Amen cannot be rendered by So 
be it; and the attempt to substitute any grammatical phrase 
in place of it must rob it of some of its symbolic power. 
This is the case with all interjections, and it is of the 
essence of an interjection that it should be so. 



CHAPTER IV. 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

Philology seeks to penetrate into the Nature of 
language : Grammar is concerned only with its literary- 
Habits. 

Grammatical analysis is the dissection of speech as the 
instruvient of literature. The student may help himself to 
remember this by observing that grammatice (ypafxixaTKrj) is 
derived from the Greek word for literature, ypafifiara. 

The chief result of grammar, the exponent of grammatical 
analysis, is the doctrine of the Parts of Speech. All the 
words which combine to make up structural language are 
classified in this systematic division. But it is important for 
the philologer to understand that the quality of words, 
whereby they are so distinguished and divided, is a habit, 
and not anything innate or grounded in the nature of the 
words. We shall endeavour to make this plain. 

Grammar analyses language in order to ascertain the 
conditions on which the faculty of expression is dependent, 
and also to gain more control over that faculty. This 
object limits the range of grammatical enquiry. The 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. IJJ 

grammarian makes a certain number of groups to which he 
can refer any word, and then he forms rules in which he 
legislates class-wise for the words so grouped. We must here 
assume that the ordinary grammatical knowledge is already 
in the possession of the reader. 

To be able to designate each word as such or such a 
part of speech, and to practise the rules for combining parts 
of speech together, is the ordinary task of grammar. The 
determination of the part of speech is therefore the barrier 
beyond which grammar does not (generally speaking) pur- 
sue the analysis. And although what is called parsing, or 
assigning words to their parts, is a juvenile exercise, yet 
it is nevertheless the surest test of a person's having learnt 
that which grammar has to teach; especially if he can 
do it in the English sentence. For it is easier to do in 
Latin. A boy may be quite ignorant of the meaning of 
a Latin sentence, and of each word in ^it ; and yet he may 
be able to answer that navahat, for example, is a verb in the 
active voice, imperfect tense, indicative mood. He knows 
this from having learnt the forms of the Latin verb, and he 
knows the ending -ahat for the verbal form of that voice, 
tense, and mood. Such knowledge is but formal and me- 
chanical. If however, in parsing English, he meets the verb 
loved, he cannot venture to pronounce what part of the verb 
it is by a mere look at the form. It may be the indicative, 
or the subjunctive, or it may be the participle. Which it 
is he can only tell by understanding the phrase in which it 
stands. 

Throughout the Latin language the words are to a very 
great extent grammatically ticketed. In the English lan- 
guage the same thing exists, but in a very slight degree. 
In Latin, the part of speech is most readily determined by 
regard to the form, and it is only occasionally that attention 

N 



1 78 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH, 

to the Structure becomes necessary. Parsing in Latin is 
therefore mainly an exercise in what is called the Acci- 
dence, that is the grammatical inflections of words. In 
English, on the contrary, there is so Httle to be gathered 
by looking at the mere form, that the exercise of parsing 
trains the mind to a habit of judging each word's value 
by reference to its yoke-fellows in the sentence. A single 
example will make this plain. It would be a foolish 
question to ask, without reference to a context. What 
part of speech is /ove ? because it may stand either for 
a verb or for a noun. But if you ask in Latin, What 
part of speech is amare or caritas ? the question can be 
answered as well without a context as with. Each word 
has in fact a bit of context attached to it, for an inflection \<s 
simply a fragment of context, and a nominative is as much 
an inflection as a genitive. And this is the cause why it is 
easier to catch the elements of grammatical ideas through 
the medium of a highly inflected language like Latin. On 
the other hand, those ideas can best be perfected through 
the medium of a language with few inflections, like English. 
For in studying grammar through the English language, we 
purge our minds of the wooden notion that it is an inherent 
quality in a word to be of this or that part of speech. 

To be a noun, or a verb, or an adjective, is a function 
which the word discharges in such and such a context, and 
not a character innate in the word or inseparable from it. 
Thus the word save is a verb, whether infinitive to save, or 
indicative / save, or imperative save me : but it is the self- 
same word when it stands as a preposition, 'forty stripes 
save one.' 

The force of these observations is not lessened by the 
fact that there are many words in English that discharge but 
one function, and are of one part of speech only. In such 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 1 79 

cases the habit of the word has become fixed, it has lost the 
plastic state which is the original and natural condition of 
every word, and it has contracted a rigid and invariable 
character. The bulk of Latin words are in this state, simply 
because they are not pure words at all, but fragments of 
a phrase. Each Latin word has its function as noun or 
verb or adverb ticketed upon it. But in English the words 
of fixed habit are comparatively few. In a general way it 
may be said that the pronouns are so in all languages. Yet 
even this group, of all groups the most habit-bound, is net 
without its occasional assertions of natural freedom. The 
prepositions are many of them in the fixed state, but the 
researches of the philologer tend to set many of them in 
a freer light. We must not therefore regard the parts of 
speech as if they were like the parts of a dissected map, where 
each piece is unfit to stand in any place but one. Each 
part of speech is what it is, either by virtue of the place 
it now occupies in the present sentence ; or else, by virtue of 
an old habit which contracted its use to certain special 
positions ; or thirdly, by reason of its carrying about with it 
a fragment of another word under the form of an inflection, 
by which its grammatical relations are limited and deter- 
mined. And as the second and third of these cases will be 
found to melt into one, the result is that all words are 
induced to be of such and such a part of speech, either 
by the manner of their present employment, or else by 
inveterate habit. 

Before we proceed to the examples which w^ill illustrate 
the above remarks, we must make a clearance of one thing 
which else might cause confusion. There is a sense in 
which every word in the world is a noun. When we speak 
of the word have, or the word marry, these words are re- 
garded as objects of sense, and are mere nouns. Just in 



l8o OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

the same way in the expression ' the letter A/ this alpha- 
betic symbol becomes a noun. In this aspect each item in 
the whole catalogue of letters and words in a dictionary is 
presented to our minds as a noun. And beyond the pages 
of the dictionary, there are situations in the course of con- 
versation and of literature in which this is the case. Thus, 
in Shakspeare, King John, i. i, 'Have is have;' and in 
Longfellow's 

'Mother, what does marry mean?' 

In these cases the word is (as one may say) taken up 
between the finger and thumb, and looked at, and made 
an object of. It is no longer, as words commonly are, 
a mere presentive of some object or a mere symbol of some 
relation between objects, but it enters for the moment into 
an objective position of its own. And there are many 
instances of this. 

Must is a verb. But when we hear the popular saying, 
' Oh ! you must, must you ? Must is made for the Queen : ' 
here must is a noun. 

To the same category may be most suitably referred those 
instances in which interjections make their appearance as 
nouns. Thus, in Sir Charles Grandison, Letter xvi., 

' Many hems passed between them, now the uncle looking on the nephew, 
now the nephew on the uncle.' 

Or, as in the following from Cowper, 

' Where thou art gone, 
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown.' 

Or, in more familiar style, 

' I took it in without another hum and haJ Mrs. Prosser, Quality Fogg's 
Old Ledger, ch. v. 

This ' objective ' citation of words being cleared away, 
it remains now to consider how words may change their 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 151 

subjective condition, that is to say, their relation to the 
thinking mind, and vary their characters as parts of speech 
accordingly. 

1. And first, the verb may become a noun, as — 

' To err is human, to forgive divine.' 

' To live in hearts we leave behind, 
Is not to die.' 

Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground. 

But the true substantival form of the verb is that in ~ing, 
as the following passages will exemplify : — 

' It was not the not knowing, but the not approving, which was the 
cause of their not tisifig it.' John Milton, Areopagitica. 

' But if the purchase costs so dear a price 
As soothing Folly or exalting Vice, . . . ' 

Alexander Pope, Temple of Fame, 515. 

' Disbanded legions freely might depart, 
And slaying men would cease to be an art,' 

William Cowper. 

In all these instances the -I'ng form represents the ancient 
infinitive in -an, and is in fact the verb turned through its 
infinitive form into the grammatical noun. A more com- 
plete explanation of this frequent stumblingblock will be 
found in its right place in the Syntax. 

2. Next, the noun may become a verb. The interjection 
pooh-pooh becomes a noun when we say, ' He cried pooh- 
pooh;* and this noun becomes a verb when we use the 
expression ' to pooh-pooh a question.' 

The word handicap is an old Saxon noun meaning a com- 
promise or bargain, and in this character, I suppose, it 
figures in the technical language of horse-racing. It is odd 
that this notorious expression has never been included in 
our dictionaries. I have searched Richardson, Webster, and 



1 82 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

Latham, in vain. My notion is that the racing term refers 
to the practice of making horses carry weight as a com- 
pensation for any advantage they might have in respect of 
age. If I am wrong, my ignorance would only be a natural 
consequence of my aversion to the turf as a national evil. 
All I am here concerned with is the fact that the sporting 
world employs the word nounally. But it frequently stands 
for a verb, as in the following from a contemporary journal. 

' The legitimate objects of the Trades' Unions are overlaid by elaborate 
attempts to handicap ability and industry, and to exclude competition.' 

Further examples in which a word usually regarded as a 
noun makes its appearance as a verb : — 

' With all good grace to grace a gentleman.' 

Two Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 4. 

' Psalm us no psalms.' 

Charles Kingsley, The Saint's Tragedy, v. 3. 

'In 181 1 the Swedes, though not yet actually at war with England, were 
making active preparations for defence by sea and land, " in case," says 
Parry, " we should be inclined to Copefihagen them." ' Memoirs of Sir W. 
E. Parry, by his son, ch. ii. 

' I'll prose it here, I'll verse it there. 
And picturesque it everywhere.' 
William Combe, Doctor Syntax in search of the Picttiresgue, Canto i. 

' Them as goes away to better themselves, often worses themselves, as I 
call it.' Anthony TroUope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. xlii. 

Passing to more familiar and trivial instances, such as are 
(be it remembered) the best examples of the unfettered and 
natural action of a language, we hear such expressions as 
' to cadle a message ; ' and again, ' If such a thing happens, 
wire me.' 

I do not say that these expressions have become an ac- 
knowledged part of the language. If we confined our atten- 
tion solely to that which is mature and established, we should 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. £83 

act like a botanist who never studied buds, or a physiologist 
who neglected those phenomena which are pecuHar to young 
things. Young sprigs of language have a levity and skittish- 
ness which render them unworthy of literature and grammar, 
but which make an exhibition of the highest value for the 
purposes of philology. There are many movements which 
are natural and which are among the best guides to the stu- 
dent of nature, which are discontinued with staid age. There 
is much in Shakspeare which the ripe age of modern litera- 
ture would not admit. It is a main character of philology 
as contrasted with grammar that it is unconfined by such 
canons, and that the whole realm of speech is within its 
province. 

Not only does the language avail itself of this facility of 
verbifying a noun, but even where there is already by the 
ancient development of the language a verb and a noun of 
the same subject, the verb will sometimes drop into disuse 
and a new verb will be made by preference out of the noun. 
For example, we had the verb /o graff, as in our version, 
Rom. xi. 17, 19, and the noun gra/"/. But we have long 
since dropped the proper verb graff and have made a new 
verb out of the substantive. Everybody now talks oi grafting, 
and says to graft, and we never hear of to graff except in 
church. 

Now, as it had already been observed as far back as 
Home Tooke's time, that the minor parts of speech are 
derived from the verbs and nouns, it might almost seem to 
result from this interchange of verb and noun that a similar 
plasticity would be found running through all the gram- 
matical divisions of the language. But it will be more satis- 
factory to proceed by examples, than to trust to conclusions. 

3. The noun becomes an adjective. This is so very fre- 
quent in our language that examples are offered not so much 



I«4 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

to establish the fact as to identify it. Main is a well-known 
old Saxon substantive, which appears in its original cha- 
racter in such an expression as 'might and main;' but it 
becomes an adjective in 'main force/ or in that of Milton, 
Paradise Lost, vi. 654, 

' And on their heads 
Main promontories flung.' 

We have an example of a different kind in the word cheap. 
This originally was a substantive, meaning market, and the 
expression ' good cheap ' meant to say that a person had 
made a good marketing, just as the French bon marcM (from 
which it was in fact derived) still does. While it went with 
an adjective harnessed to it, it was manifestly regarded as 
a noun. But since we no more speak of ' good cheap ; ' 
since we have changed it to ' very cheap ; ' and since the 
word has taken the degrees of cheaper and cheapest, — its. 
adjectival character is established beyond question. 

4. The adjective becomes a noun. In such expressions 
as ' the young and the old,' ' the good and the bad,' ' the 
rich and the poor,' ' the high and the low,' ' the strong 
and the weak,' we have adjectives used substantively. 
Such is the usual way of describing these expressions 
grammatically. It might, however, be asked, Are they 
not really substantives.? For what other rule is there to 
know a substantive by, except this, that it is a word used 
substantively ? But, though there is no other principle 
for deciding safely what is a noun, yet there are tokens 
which may often be appealed to with the chance of a better 
reception. When an adjective employed substantively takes 
the plural form of substantives, it is impossible, according to 
grammatical rules, to deny it the quality of substantives ; for 
the adjective has no plural form in English grammar. There- 
fore the words irrationals and comestibles in the followins: 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 1 85 

quotations, though adjectives by form and extraction, must 
be called grammatical substantives, not only on account of 
their substantival use, but also by reason of their gram- 
matical form. 

' Irrationals all sorrow are beneath.' 

Edward Young, Night Thoughts, v. 538. 

' What thousands of homes there are in which the upholstery is excellent, 
the comestibles costly, and the grand piano unexceptionable, both for cabinet 
work and tone, in which not a readable book is to be found in secular 
literature,' Intellectual Observer, October, 1866. 

So the adjective ivorthy has become a noun when we 
speak of a worthy and the worthies. Other grammatical 
structures, besides plurality, may demonstrate that an adjec- 
tive must be acknowledged for a noun. We call contemporary 
an adjective in the connection contempary with ; but it is 
a noun when we say a contemporary of. The word good 
considered by itself would be called an adjective, but it is 
an acknowledged substantive, not only in the plural form 
goods, but also in such a construction as ' the good of the 
land of Egypt,' Genesis xlv. 18. 

And specially must the whilom adjective be called a 
substantive when it is suited with an adjective of its own. 
The adjectives ancient, preventive, must be parsed as sub- 
stantives in the following quotations : — 

' Still, however, I must remain a professed ancieut on that head.' Gold- 
smith, Dedication of The Deserted Village. 

' Those sanitary measures which experience has shown to be the best 
preventive' Queen's Speech, 1867. 

The word /rolic, originally an adjective, has passed into 
the substantival condition, and on this latter basis has ap- 
peared as a verb. As an adjective it appears in 

' The frolic wind.' John Milton. 
' The gay, the frolic, and the loud.' Edmund Waller. 



1 86 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH, 

As a substantive it appears not only in a quotation given 
by Webster from Roscommon, 

' He would be at his frolic once again,' 

but we learn from the same lexicographer that the word has 
in America a popular substantival use in the sense of, ' A 
scene of gayety and mirth, as in dancing or play.' 

As a verb it appears in the Christian Year, Second 
Sunday after Epiphany : — 

'We frolic to and fro.' 

5. This changeableness of grammatical character may 
also be seen in the adverb. The commonest form of the 
adverb, namely that in -ly, is one that was made out of an 
adjective, which was made out of a noun; as will be fully 
explained below in the section on the adverb. A noun may 
suddenly by a vigorous stroke of art be transformed into 
an adverb, as the noxm/orest in the following passage : — 

''Twas a lay 

More subtle-cadenced, more forest wild ■ 
Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child.' 

John Keats, Endymion. 

The same word may be an adverb or a conjunction. The 
word but appears in these two characters in this line, — 

' His yeares hut young, hut his experience old.' 

Tiuo Gentlemen of Verona, ii. 4. 

If you are asked what part of speech is out, you might 
think of the phrase out of doors, and say a preposition ; or 
you might think of he is gone out, and say an adverb ; but 
when we read in Bleak House, ch. xxix., ' while on a short 
out in the county of Lincolnshire with a friend,' we must 
unhesitatingly pronounce it a noun. 

Sometimes the employment of one and the same word in 
a diversity of grammatical powers leads to a modification of 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. ■ 1 87 

the form of the word. The old preposition ^ueh has come 
to be employed as an adjective, as, ' a thorough draught/ 
or, as in the following quotation, 

' These two critics, Bentley and Lachmann, were thorough masters of 
their craft." Dr. Lightfoot, Galatians, Pref 

It has been a modern consequence of this adjectival use 
of thorough, that a different form has been established for the 
preposition, viz. through. But this variety of form does not 
interfere with the justice of the statement that here we have 
had the same word in two grammatical characters. 

6. How nearly the offices of preposition and conjunction 
border upon each other may be seen from one or two 
examples. In the Scotch motto, ' Touch not the cat but the 
glove,' but is the old preposition, signifying without. This is 
the character and signification which it had in early times, 
and from which the better known uses of but are derivative. 
If, however, we expanded this sentence a little without 
alteration to its sense, and write it thus : ' Touch not the 
cat but first put on the glove,' we perceive that but is no 
longer a preposition — it has become a conjunction. 

In the sentence, ' I sav/ nobody else but him,' but is a pre- 
position : if, however, it be expressed thus, ' I saw nobody 
else, but I saw him,' but is a conjunction. 

In like manner the word /or may easily pass from the 
state of a preposition to that of a conjunction. If I say 
* I am QomQ/or you,' the for is a preposition ; but if I say, 
' I am come for to fetch you,' for would be called a con- 
junction. 

In the sentence, 'I will attend to no one before you,' 
befoj-e is a preposition. But if the same thing be thus 
worded, 'I will attend to no one before I have attended 
to you,' before is a conjunction. 

In the sentence, ' he behaved like a scoundrel,' like is a 



1 88 • OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

preposition. But if we say it in provincial English, thus, 
'he behaved like a scoundrel would,' like is a con- 
junction. 

The word 7nuch starts as an adjective, that is to say, the 
earhest grammatical character it bears within the limits of our 
observation is adjectival. Thus we say much seed, much 
wealth, much time, much people. Thence it easily becomes 
an adverb, as much less, much mightier, much discouraged, 
much afflicted, much regretted. 

So far I have the authority of Webster. When he goes 
on to give much as a noun in phrases like 

' He that gathered muck had noihing over,' Exodus xvi., 

' To whom 7nuch is given, of him much will be required,' Luhe xii., 

I should so far differ from him, that I should prefer to call 
it a pronoun, for reasons that will appear in the next 
chapter. 

From this pronominal use it becomes qualified to enter 
into conjunctional phrases, though it does not constitute ; 
a conjunction all by itself. 1 

' The geological collection at Scarborough is much as William Smith i 
left it.' 

Here much as is the conjunction which adjusts the rela- 
tion of the two verbs is and le/t. We could not refuse to 
acknowledge this as a conjunction, seeing we should be 
forced to admit that inasmuch as djvdi forasmuch as are con- 
junctions. 

While was once a noun, signifying time. And so indeed 
it still is, as a long ivhile. But now it is better known as 
a conjunction : thus — 

' It is very well established that one man may steal a horse while another 
may not so much as look over the hedge,' 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 189 

As is generally called a conjunction, but we see it in the 
character of a relative pronoun in the following quotation : — 

' As far as I can see, 'tis them as is done wrong to as is so sorry and 
penitent and all that, and them as wrongs is as comferble as ever they can 
stick.' Lettice Lisle, ch. xxvii. 

Here a philological friend steps in, and questions the pro- 
priety of this example on the ground of ' authority.' This 
is an unphilological objection. Does he question the fact 
that as is so used by millions of speakers .? No ; that is out 
of all question. He only means that it is not established 
in literature. And I grant that if in any writing of my own 
I adopted this use of as, I might be justly confronted with 
the demand for my ' authority.' If I declined the challenge, 
and continued to use the expression, it would amount to 
a trial of strength on my part whether I had the power to 
get this provinciaHsm accepted, or at least permitted. Occa- 
sionally a strange expression is admitted, but the privilege of 
ushering it belongs chiefly to those lawful lords of literature, 
the poets. My friend's objection is in short a grammatical 
and not a philological objection. I am under the ordinary 
rules of grammar in my composition, but I entirely repu- 
diate them in my illustrations. Why, indeed, the best 
facts of language often lie beyond these formal props that 
fence the park of literature ! This is a digression, but one 
for which I make no apology. On the contrary, I thank the 
friend whose objection has led to the re-assertion of a prin- 
ciple which, in the present state of philology, can hardly be 
too often reiterated or too variously exemplified. 

The difference of function which one and the same word 
may perform, often furnishes the ground of a playful turn 
of expression, something like a pun. But it is distinct from 
a pun, is more subtle, and is allowed to constitute the point 
of an epigram, as in that of Mrs. Jane Brereton on Beau 



190 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

Nash's full-length picture being placed between the busts 

of Newton and Pope : — 

' This picture placed these busts between, 
Gives satire its full strength ; 
Wisdom and wit are little seen, 
But folly at full length.' 

This is a play on two functions of the word li'f/k, which 
must here be thought of as adjective and adverb at once, 
i.e. (in Latin) as equal at once to exigui (small) and to raro 
(seldom). For want of attention to this, the line has been 
erroneously edited thus : — 

' Wisdom and wit are seldom seen.' 

If any one wishes for more illustrations of this fact — that 
the grammatical character of a word is only a habit, one 
actual habit out of many possible ones — he should consider 
some of the following references to Shakspeare. 



Winters Tale., 


, i. 


I. 


28, 


vast (substantive). 






2. 


5o> 


verily. 




ii. 


3- 


63. 


hand. 


Richard II. 


ii. 


3- 


86, 


uncle me no tincle. 




V. 


3- 


139' 


dogge. 


I Henry IV. 


i. 


3- 


76, 


so. 




iii. 


3- 


41. 


good cheap. 


2 Henry IV. 


i. 


3- 


37. 


indeed (verb). 




iv. 


1. 


71, 


there (nounized). 


Henry V. 


iv. 


3- 


63, 


gentle. 






5- 


17, 


friend (verb). 




V. 


2. 


51. 


teems (transitive). 



These examples all point to the one conclusion that the 
quaHty of speech-part-ship (if the expression may be for 
once admitted), is not a fixed and absolute one, but subject 
to and dependent upon the relations of each word to the 
other words with which it is forming a sentence. If we have 
recourse, for example's sake, to those languages which have 
preserved their grammar in the most primitive and rudi- 



OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 1 91 

mentary 'condition, we find that each word has retained 
its natural faculty for discharging all the functions of the 
parts of speech. 

In Chinese there is ' no formal distinction between a noun, 
a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition. The same 
root, according to its position in a sentence, may be employed 
to convey the meaning of great, greatness, greatly, and to be 
great Everything in fact depends in Chinese on the proper 
collocation of words in a sentence ^.' Between this state of 
things and the development of the modern languages, there 
has intervened the inflectional state of speech, of which the 
grammatical character is as nearly as possible the direct 
opposite to that which has been stated concerning the 
Chinese. In the inflectional state of language, each word 
carries about with it a formal mark of distinction, by which 
it is known what the habitual vocation of that w^ord is. Thus 
in Greek the word novos, even standing alone, bears the 
aspect of being a noun in the nominative case. But the 
English word labour, standing alone, is no more a noun 
than it is a verb, and no more a verb than it is a noun. 
The inflectional languages are not all equally inflectional; 
this character has its degrees. The Greek is not so rigidly 
inflectional as the Latin. But both of them are far more 
so than any of the languages of modern Europe. Of afl 
the modern languages, that which has most shaken off in- 
flections is the English, and next to the English, the French. 
We have but a very few inflections remaining in our lan- 
guage. And this increases the freedom with which our 
language may be handled. We are recovering some of that 
long-lost and infantine elasticity which was the property 
of primitive speech. 

^ Lectures on the Science of Language, by Max Miiller, 1 861, p. 275. 



192 OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH. 

But while the modern languages, and English especially, 
are casting off that cocoon of inflections which the habits 
of thousands of years had gradually swathed about them, 
there is no possibility of their getting back to a Chinese 
state of verbal homogeneousness. Such a state is incom- 
patible with a high condition of development. A language 
of which no part has any fixed character must rank low 
among languages, just as among animals those which have 
no distinction of flesh, bone, sinew, or hair. Or, as in com- 
munities of men, division of labour, distinct vocations, and 
all the concomitant rigidity of individual habit, is necessary 
to advanced civilization. 

There is no appearance of a tendency to fall back into 
a primitive state of language. The freedom which modern 
languages are asserting for themselves as against the re- 
straints of flexion, may be carried out to its extremest issues, 
and no appearance would ever arise of a tendency back- 
wards to a state of pulpy homogeneousness. For there is 
a movement from which there is no going back, a slow but 
incessant movement, which gradually creates a distinction 
among words greater and more deeply seated than that of 
the parts of speech. This is a movement in which all lan- 
guages partake more or less, according to the vigour of intel- 
lectual life with which they are animated. This is a move- 
ment which rears barriers of distinction between one and 
another class of words as immoveable as the sea-wall which 
the sea itself has sometimes built to sever the pasture from 
the bed of the ocean. The explanation of this movement 
must occupy another chapter. 



CHAPTER V. 

OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 
AND OF INFLECTIONS. 

Philology makes more use of the signification of words 
than grammar does. For grammar deals only with the 
literary forms, functions, and habits of words ; philology 
deals with the very words themselves. Grammar regards 
words as the instruments of literature; philology regards 
them as the exponents of mind. Philology has to do with 
language in its fullest sense, as being that whole com- 
pound thing which is made up of voice and meaning, 
sound and signification, written form and associated idea. 

It appertains to philology to omit none of the phenomena 
of language, but to give them all their due consideration. 
Hence it comes to pass that the outward and the inward, the 
form and the signification, will come by turns under review. 
And though the inward or mental side of language will 
occupy less of our space than its correlative, yet each 
reference to it will be more in the nature of a reference to 
principle, and will score its results deeper on our whole 
method of proceeding. 

As we proceed, the subject grows upon our hands. We 
cannot treat of our native language in a philological manner 
o 



194 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

without getting down to some fundamental principles. In 
the present work we began like a botanist with the flower ; 
but the progress of the enquiry leads in due time through 
the whole economy of the plant, and will at length bring us 
to its root. While we dwelt over the historical circumstances 
in the midst of which our language first expanded to the 
light, while we noted the source from which it was supplied 
with alphabetic characters, while we surveyed its spelling and 
pronunciation, and its homely interjections, we were acting 
like a botanist examining a particular floret of the multi- 
tudinous head of some grassy inflorescence. But now we 
move down the stalk which bears many such florets, and we 
have to admit principles which embrace the systems of many 
languages. At this point we enter upon the very heart of the 
subject; and the growing importance of the matter makes 
me fear lest I should fail in the exposition of it. All things 
cannot be rendered equally easy for the student, and I must 
here ask him to lend me the vigour of his attention while 
I try to expound that upon which will hinge much of the 
meaning of chapters to come. 

There is a distinction in the signification of words 
which calls for primary attention in philology. I would ask 
the reader to contemplate such words as spade, heron, hand- 
saiv, pike-staff, barn-door ; and then to turn his mind to such 
as the following, I, you, they, of, in, over, hut, where, never ^ 
how, therefore. It will be at once felt that there is a gulf 
between these two sorts of words, and that there must be 
a natural distinction between them. 

The one set presents objects to the mind, the other does 
not. Some of them, such as the pronouns, continue to 
reflect an object once presented, 2J& John he. But there is 
a diff'erence in nature between the \NordiJohn and the word 
he. If I say at Jerusalem .... there, the word Jerusalem 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 1 95 

belongs to the one class, and the words <2/, /kere, belong to 
the other class. 

We will call these two classes of words by the names of 
Presentivb and Symbolic. 

The Presentive are those which present an object to the 
memory or to the imagination; or, in brief, which present 
any conception to the mind. For the things presented 
need not be objects of sense, as in the first list of ex- 
amples. The words Jus /ice, patience, clemency, fairy, elf, 
spirit, abstraction, generalization, classification, are as pre- 
sentive as any words can be. The only point of difference 
between these and those is one that does not belong to 
philology. It is the difference of minds. There are people 
to whom some of the latter words would have no meaning, 
and therefore would not be presentive. But every word is 
supposed by the philologer to carry its requisite condition 
of mind with it. 

The Symbolic words are those which by themselves pre- 
sent no meaning to the mind, and which depend for their 
intelligibility on a relation to some presentive word or words. 
We enter not at present into the question how they became 
so limited ; we simply take our stand on the fact. Whether 
they can be shown to be mere altered specimens of the 
presentive class, or whether there is room to imagine in any 
case that they have had a source of their own, independent 
of the presentives, the difference exists, and is most pal- 
pable. And the more we attend to it, the more shall we find 
that broad results are attainable from the study of this great 
distinction. 

What, for example, is the joke in such a question as that 
which has afforded a moment's amusement to many gene- 
rations of youth. Who dragged ivhom round what and 
where ? except this, that symbols which stand equally for any 



ig6 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS^ 

person, any thing, or any place, are rendered ludicrous by 
being employed as if they presented to the mind some par- 
ticular person, some particular thing, or some particular 
place ? The question is rather unsubstantial, simply because 
the words are symbolic where they should be presentive. It 
is not utterly unsubstantial, because the verb dragged round 
is presentive. Put a more symbolic verb in its stead and you 
have a perfectly unsubstantial question : Who did what, and 
where did he do it? Who's who? To this class of words 
ignorance and vacancy of mind necessarily resort, as the 
Israelites, when they saw manna, said Man hu, What is it ? 

And here it will be very desirable to establish a clear 
understanding of the general difference between presentive- 
ness and symbolism. For this purpose it may be useful to 
notice a few cases which are more or less analogous. When 
barbers' poles were first erected, they were presentive, for 
they indicated by white bands of paint the linen bandages 
which were used in blood-letting, an operation practised 
by the old surgeon-barbers. In our tim.e we only know 
(speaking of the popular mind) that the pole indicates 
a barber's shop, but why or how is unknown. And this is 
symbolism. 

The twelve signs of the zodiac are expressed by two sets 
of figures, the one presentive of a ram, a bull, a crab, &c., 
the other set only symbolical of the same, with a trace- 
able relationship between the symbols and the pictures. 

But the most appropriate illustration may be gathered 
from the letters of the Alphabet. The letter a once was 
a picture, and it represented a bull's head, as may more 
easily be believed by the youthful reader if the letter is put 
before him in the form of 7^, with its two horns. And the 
ancient name of the letter, Aleph, in Hebrew (whence 
Alpha in Greek) signifies a bull. Now it has long ago 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 1 97 

ceased to picture the animal, and we are in the habit of 
calling it a symbol of the vowel-sound with which the name 
of the animal began. 

The consonant b was once a picture of a house, and 
that is the meaning of its Hebrew name Beth, whence the 
Greek name Beta. And in like manner d is an old picture 
of a door, which is the sense of its name Daleth in Hebrew, 
whence the Greek name Delta. But these two letters (like 
the vowel above) have long ago lost all but an archaeolo- 
gical connection with the objects they once pictured, and they 
are now the mere symhols of the consonantal sounds which 
were initial to the names of the represented objects. And so 
through the whole Alphabet. It began in presentation and 
has reached a state of symbolism. 

Here we perceive that there has been a complete change 
of nature. The pictorial character with which the intention 
of the first artist invested the figure has gradually and un- 
designedly evaporated from that figure, and has left a mere 
vague phantom of a character in its place, a thing which is 
the representative of nothing. And if we set the gain 
against the loss of such a transition, we find that the symbol 
has gained enormously in range, to make up for what it has 
lost in pictorial force. While it was presentive, it was tied 
to a single object : since it became a symbol, it is ubiquitous 
in its function. 

These observations will apply also in some degree to our 
two systems of numeration, the Roman and the Arabic. 
The numerals I and II and III and IIII are presentive of 
the ideas of one and two and three and four, as truly as the 
holding up of so many fingers would be presentive of those 
ideas. The numeral V is practically a mere symbol, though 
it began in presentation, if it be true that it is derived from 
the hand, the thumb forming the one side, and the four 



198 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

fingers the other. The figures i and 2 and 3 and 4, &c., 
are and always were pure symbols. And it is worthy of 
observation, that the whole system of Decimal Arithmetic 
hinges upon these symbolic figures, or has acquired im- 
mense addition to its range "of capabilities by the use of 
these figures. So in like manner will it be found by and 
bye, that the modern development of languages has hinged 
mainly upon symbolic words, and that their instrumentality 
has been the chief means of what progress has been made 
in the capabilities of expression. 

The same general tendency which makes symbols take 
the place of pictures, makes or has made symbolic words 
take the place of presentives in a great number of instances. 
This tendency has led to the formation out of the large mass 
of presentive verbs of a select number of symbolic verbs, 
which are the light and active intermediaries, and the general 
servants of the presentive verbs. Thus the verbs partake 
of both characters, the presentive and the symbolic. But as 
regards the rest of the parts of speech, they fall into two 
natural halves under the influence of this distinction. The 
nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are presentive words; the 
pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions are symbolic 
words. But if the reader should find himself unable to 
establish so simple an adjustment between the two systems, 
I would observe that nothing depends on it. The attempt ' 
to effect a harmony between an artificial and a natural 
classification, is always liable to fail at certain points. Nature 
is not such a rigid classifier as man. 

Moreover there is much of what is arbitrary in the deno- 
mination assigned by grammarians to many a word. Dic- 
tionaries and grammars are not quite at one on this head. 
Some will think perhaps that my symbolic words are found 
to invade the domain of noun, adjective, and adverb; while 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 



199 



they fail to cover and fully occupy what I have assigned to 
them, namely, the pronoun, conjunction, and preposition. 

Therefore the grammatical scheme should not be trusted 
to as a frame for the new division. The student must seize 
the distinction itself; and the illustration of it by reference to 
the grammatical scale is only offered as a temporary as- 
sistance. 

The best illustration of it will be found in its application 
when we come to the syntax. For the present we can only 
give a few examples of the transition of a word from a pre- 
sentive to a symbolic use. 

Thing. This is a very good example, on account of its 
unmixed simpleness. For it is almost purely symbohc, and 
devoid of presentive power. It is still more. It is of 
universal application in its symbolic power. There is not 
a subject of speech which may not be indicated by the word 
thi7tg. This will at once be acknowledged upon considera- 
tion of such passages as the following : — 

' All things serve Thee.' 

' By these ways, as by the testimony of the creature, we come ^ to find an 
eternal and independent Being, upon which all things else depend, and by 
which all things else are governed,' — John Pearson, An Exposition of the 
Creed, Art. I. 

By these quotations it is apparent that we cannot name 
a creature, whether visible or invisible, whether an object of 
sense or of thought, which may not be indicated by the word 
ihmg. It is therefore of universal application in its sym- 
bolical power \ 

But if we ask, on the other hand, what idea does this 
word present ? we answer, none ! There is no creature. 



^ The few instances in which thing (with a faint rhetorical emphasis) is 
opposed to person, are to be regarded as stranded relics on the path of the 
transition which the bulk of the word has passed through. 



200 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

no subject of speech or of thought, which can claim the 
word thmg as its presenter. There was a time when the 
word was presentive like any ordinary noun, but that time 
is now far behind us. The most recent example I am able 
to quote is of the fourteenth century. 

In Chaucer' Prologue it occurs twice presentively : — 

' He wolde the see were kept for any thyng 
Bitwixen Myddelburgh and Orewelle,' (1. 278.) 

' Thar to he koude endite and make a thyng.' (1. 327.) 

The fullness of tone which the rhythm requires for the 
word ihy7tg in both these places, is by itself almost enough 
to indicate that they are not to be taken as when we say 
'■ I would not do it for anything,' or ' Here 's a thing will do.' 
In these trivial instances the word is vague and symboHcal, 
but it would hardly have beseemed such a poet as Chaucer 
to bring the stroke of his measure down upon such gos- 
samer. The Merchant desired that the sea should be pro- 
tected for the sake of commerce at any p7'tce, conditmi, or 
cost, on any terms. For such is the old sense of the word 
thing. The old verb to thing, in Saxon \ingian, meant to 
make terms, to compromise, pacisci. So also in German the 
word 5)ing had a like use, as may be seen through its com- 
pounds. The verb 6ebingcn is to stipulate, bargain; and 
-^ebingimg is condition, terms of agreement, contract. 

In Denmark and Norway the word still retains its pre- 
sentiveness, and signifies a judicial or deliberative assembly. 
In Denmark the places where the judges hold session are 
called Ting. In Norway the Parliament is called Stor Ting, 
that is. Great Thing. In Molbech's Danish Dictioiiary there 
is a list of compounds with Ting, in its presentive power of 
adjudicating or adjusting conflicting interests. 

In such a sense it is said by Chaucer that his Sergeaunt of 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 201 

Lawe could endite and make a thyng, meaning, he could 
make a good contract, was a good conveyancer. And when 
Burns wrote — 

' Facts are chiels that winna ding,' 

I understand ' Facts are obstinate things/ or, to preserve his 
figure of speech, ' Facts are lads that will not be talked over,' 
will not make terms, will not accommodate matters by a 
compromise : ' Facts are stubborn,' 

It may be objected to the above treatment of the word 
thi7tg, that it still presents a definite idea, only at a high 
stage of generalisation. And this is not to be denied. The 
idea presented by thing is what the mediaeval logicians would 
have called entity or quiddity or some such queer name. By 
the same rule nothing also presents an idea of its own, to 
wit, 7ionentity. But to enter into such matters in a work of 
this kind, would be to mistake the plane of metaphysics for 
that of philology. We take as the standard of philological 
reasoning the attitude and the glance of the mind as engaged 
in the direct use of language, and not as engaged in the 
reflective examination of it. 

A question may be raised here : What part of speech is 
this symboKc thing? Grammar, which looks only to its 
literary action, will say it is a noun, and that however much 
it may have changed in sense, it cannot cease to be a noun. 
Yet it will often be found to act the part and fill the place of 
pronouns in the classic tongues. The Latin neuter pro- 
nouns h(2c, ea, ista, their Greek analogues TavTa, eKelva, 
roiavra, roaavra, can hardly be rendered in English in any 
other way than by the expressions these things, those things, 
such things, so great things. If in all cases we must gram- 
matically insist that thing is a noun, then what part of 
speech are something, nothing, anything, everything .^ It may 



%0^ OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

be a question at what stage of symbolism a noun passes 
over to the ranks of the pronoun, but it appears plain that 
there is a point at which this transition must be admitted, 
and that the whole question turns upon the degree of sym- 
bolism that is requisite. If the word thifig has not quite 
attained that degree, it must be allowed that it approaches 
very near to it. 

Grammar is apt to get bound by its own rules, and to 
become the slave of its own traditions. Now the word much 
(on which I promised some further remarks above, p. i88) 
has been traditionally called a noun in certain positions 
which have been specified in the place referred to. This is 
merely a consequence of the Latin Grammars and Dic- 
tionaries of an unphilological age having called niultum 
a noun. English grammarians, taking their cue from Latin 
studies, have made much a noun accordingly. If we are to 
seek a principle in such matters, and not be guided entirely 
by chance accidents, we must call much, by reason of its 
purely symbolic nature, a pronoun, in such a phrase as 
' Where much is given.' 

Will, would; shall, should. The word shall offers 
a good example of the movement from presentiveness to 
symbolism. When it flourished as a presentive word, it 
signified to owe. Of this ancient state of the word a me- 
morial exists in the German adjective fc^ulbig, indebted. 
From this state it passed by slow and unperceived move- 
ments to that sense which is now most familiar to us, in 
which it is a verbal auxiliary, charging the verb with a sense 
fluctuating between the future tense and the imperative 
mood. This is that gossamer use of the word in which the 
well-known uncertainty arises, whether shall or will is the 
proper thing to say in particular situations. Into this much- 
worn theme we will not enter: it has been recently ex- 



AND 6f inflections. 203 

pounded by Dean Alford in Queen's English, § 208 and 
following. We are now concerned only to illustrate the 
movement from presentiveness to symbolism. ' 

How greatly the word will is felt to have changed its 
power in the last three centuries may be judged from the 
following. In Matthew xv. 32, where our Bible has 'I will 
not send them away fasting/ it is proposed by Dean Alford 
as a correction to render, ' I am not willing to, &c.' Again, 
in Matthew xx. 14, 'I will give unto this last even as unto 
thee,' the same critic finds it desirable to substitute ' It is my 
will to give, &c.' It should be noticed that in neither of 
these criticisms is there any question of Greek involved. It 
is simply an act of fetching up the expression of our Bible 
to the level of modern English. Whether such alterations 
would or would not be really improvements of our version, 
is a question which does not come under our consideration. 
As evidence that a change is come over the word will, it is 
all the more valuable as being undesignedly supplied. 

Both ivill and shall are seen in their presentive power in 
the familiar proposal to carry a basket, or to do any other 
little handy service, / will if I shall, that is, I am willing if 
you will command me ; I will if so required. 

There are still intermediate uses of the word shall which 
belong neither to the presentive state when it signified owe 
nor to the symbolic state in which it is a mere imponderable 
auxiliary. In the following quotation it has a sense which 
lies between these two extremes. 

' If the Reformers saw not how or where to draw the fine and floating 
and long-obscured line between religion and superstition, who shall dare to 
arraign them?' — Henry Hart Milnian, The Annals of St. Paul's, p. 231. 

What has been said about shall applies equally to its 
preterite should. Its common symbolic use is illustrated in 
the following quotation, — 



204 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS ^ 

' Labourers indeed were still striving with employers about the rate of 
wages — as they have striven to this very day, and will continue to strive to 
the world's end, unless some master mind should discover the true principle 
for its settlement.' — William Longman, Edward III, vol. ii. ch. iii. 

Let the reader fully comprehend the nature of this should, 
that he may be prepared to appreciate the contrast of the 
examples which follow. I found the first near my own home. 
I was ' borneing ' out some allotment ground, and Farmer 
Webb having driven a corner ' borne ' into the ground 
very effectively, exclaimed, ' There, that one '11 stand for 
twenty years, if he should/' To a person who knows 
only the English of literature, the condition would seem 
futile — if he should! It would seem to mean that the 
' borne ' would stand if it happened to stand. But this was 
not our neighbour's meaning. The person who should so 
misunderstand him, would do so for want of knowing that 
the word should has still something extant of its old pre- 
sentive power. In this instance it would have to be trans- 
lated into Latin, not thus — si fork iia evenerit ; but thus — 
si debueril, sifuerit opus : if it ought; if it be required to 
stand so long; or, in the brief colloquial, if required. 

Connected with this thread of usage, and equally derived 
from the radical sense of owe, is another power of shall 
and should, which is of a very subtle nature. It is one 
of the native traits of our mother tongue of which we 
have been deprived by the French influence. German 
scholars well know that Soil has a peculiar use to express 
something which the speaker does not assert but only 
reports. (Sr goU e8 get^an I)aBen, literally, 'he shall have 
done it,' signifies, 'he is said to have done it.' In Saxon 
this use was well known. Thus in the Peterborough 
Chronicle, a.d. 1048 (p. 178), we read: ' for ]?an Eustatius 
hsefde gecydd Jjam cynge ]?et hit sceolde beon mare gylt 
]>3ere burhwara ])onne his ' — ' forasmuch as Eustace had 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 205 

told the king that it was [forsooth I) more the towns- 
men's fault than his.' Twice in the same Chronicle it is 
recorded that a spring of blood had issued from the earth in 
Berkshire, namely, under the years 1098 and 1200. In both 
places it is added, ' swa swa manige ssedan ]?e hit geseon 
SCEOLDAN ' — ' as many said who professed to have seen it, or 
were believed to have seen it.' But now this usage is only 
provincial. It is very common in Devonshire. 'I'm told 
such a one should say.' How ancient it is, we may form an 
estimate by observing that it exists not only in German but 
in Danish also. Some specimens of Holberg are given in 
the North British Review (July, 1869, p. 426), from one of his 
dramas, entitled Erasmus Montanus. The pedantic student 
is at home for vacation, and complaining that there is no one 
in the town who has learning enough to be a fit associate 
for himself. At this point he says, according to the trans- 
lator, who is substantially correct : ' The clerk and the 
schoolmaster, it is reported, have studied ; but I know not to 
what extent.' The original Danish is, ' Degnen og Skole- 
mesteren skal have studeret, men jeg reed ikke hvorvidt det 
strsekker sig ' — Hterally, ' the clerk and the schoolmaster shall 
have studied.' These illustrations are so many traces of the 
course which this ancient verb has described in its passage 
from the presentive to the symbolic state. And, taken as 
a whole, they form so beautifully varied a series of phases, 
that had they been found in a classical language they would 
have been much admired. 

The different powers of would are illustrated in the following 
quotation, where the first would has absolutely nothing re- 
maining of that original idea of the action of Will, which is 
still present though unobtruded in the second would. 

' It would be a charity if people would sometimes in their Litanies pray 
for the very heahhy, very prosperous, very light-hearted, very much be- 
praised.' — John Keble, Life, p. 459, 



206 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDSj ' 

May, Might. Like wi7l, would, shall, should, this word 
in its auxiliary character is not presentive but symbolic. 
But we get it in its presentive function in our early poetry, 
as in the following from Chevelere Assigne, 1. 134, — 

' I my3te not drowne hem for dole,' 

the meaning of which is, I was not able to drown them for 
compassion. Here myii^te, which is the same as might, is 
presentive and means ' potui/ ' I was able.' 

This word originally meant, not ability by admission or 
permission (as now), but by power and right, as in the noun 
might and the adjective mighty. We no longer use the verb 
so. But ti makes a characteristic feature of the fourteenth- 
century poetry : — 

' There was a king that mochel might 
Which Nabugodonosor hight.' 

Confessio Amantis, Bk. i. vol. i. p. 1316, ed. Pauli. 

This would be in Latin, ' Rex quidam erat qui multum 
valebat, cui nomen Nabugodonosoro.' 

Some traces of its presentive use linger about 7?iay. We 
use it in its old sense of to be able in certain positions as, ' It 
may be avoided.' But, curious to note, we change the verb 
for the negation of this proposition, and say ' No, it cannot* 
None but the book-learned would understand 'No, it may 
not.' 

Some. As in Mrs. Barbauld's apostrophe to Life : — 

' Say not good night, but in some brighter clime, 
Bid me good morning.' 

Or as the following : — 

' So valuable a means of research has this new process of analysis proved 
itself to be, that since its first establishment, some seven short years ago, no 
less than four new chemical elements have by its help been discovered,' — 
Henry E, Roscoe, Spectrum Analysis, 186S, init. 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 207 

stm. 

' The Old Testament will still be a New Testament to him who comes 
with a fresh desire of information.' — Fuller. 

More. This is now generally known to us as a symbolic 
word, a mere sign of the comparative degree. But it is pre- 
sentive in Acts xix. 32, 'the 7nore part knew not where- 
fore they were come together;' and in that sentence of 
Bacon's — ' discretion in speech is more than eloquence.' 

Now. In this word we may illustrate the aerial perspec- 
tive which exists in symbolism. At first it appeared as an 
adverb of time, signifying ' at the present time.' Even in this 
character it is a symbolic word, but it is one that lies very 
near the presentive frontier. It is capable of light emphasis, 
as in Now is the accepted time I But then it moves off 
another stage, as, Now faith is the confidence of things hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen. Here the 7iow is incapable 
of accent; one hardly imagines the rhetorical emergency 
which would impose an emphasis on this now. Thus we see 
there is in symbolism a near and a far distance. And this 
second now, the more rarefied and symbolic of the two, is 
gradually undermining the position of the other. The careful 
writer will often have found it necessary to strike out a now 
which he had with the weightier meaning set at the head of 
a sentence, because of its liability to be accepted by the 
reader for the toneless now. 

Many years of my life was I puzzled to know what the now 
meant in i Corinthians xiii. 13, 'And now abideth faith, 
hope, charity,' &c. Why now .^ I supposed, or had been 
taught (I cannot say which), that some special adaptation or 
appropriation was intended of these virtues to the present 
dispensation. At length, by maturer familiarity with Greek, 
it became clear that the now is not one of time at all, but 
the merest symbolic, and that it ought not to have that 



2o8 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS^ 

emphasis which its English position gives it almost in spite of 
the most intelligent reader. The emphasis is on the' word 
abideth, and if this verb were put where it should be in 
the place of emphasis, it would then be practicable for 
a reader to render the ?iow as nd ' No' faith, hope, and 
charity are permanent.' Illustrations drawn from private 
experience have this natural weakness about them, that 
when a writer speaks of himself he is in danger of turning 
a personal idiosyncrasy into a fact of general interest. I 
will therefore mention that I had actually excluded this 
illustration for the reason now assigned, when a spon- 
taneous communication from a learned friend informed me 
of the fact that his experience about this passage had been 
in every particular the very same as my own. 

Do. This word is presentive in such a sentence as the 
following : — 

' My object is to do what I can to undo this great wrong.' — Edward A. 
Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, vol. iii. init. 

It is however in full activity, both as a near and also as 
a far-off symbolic word. I have often heard an old 
friend quote the following, which he witnessed at an 
agricultural entertainment. The speaker had to propose 
the chairman's health, and after much eulogy, he apos- 
trophized the gentleman thus : — ' What I mean to say, 
Sir, is this : that if more people was to do as you do, 
there wouldn't be so many do as they do do ! ' In 
the final 'do do ' it is clear we have the verb in two 
different powers, the first being highly symbolic, and 
the second almost presentive. Again, in the familiar 
salutation, 'How d'ye do.?' we have the same verb in two 
powers. Here moreover the usual mode of writing it 
conveys the important lesson, that the more symbolic a 
word is, the more it loses tone and becomes subject to 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 209 

elision. It might seem as if this observation were con- 
tradicted by the previous example, in which it is plain to 
the ear of every reader that of the two words in ' do do/ 
the former, that is to say, the more symbolic, is the more 
emphatic. But this is caused by the antithesis between that 
word and the ' was to do,' preceding. In short, it is a dis- 
turbance of the intrinsic relative weight by rhetorical 
influence. 

In this gradation of symbolism we see what provision is 
made for the lighter touches of expression, the vague tints, 
the vanishing points. Towards a deep and distant back- 
ground the full-fraught picture of copious language carries 
our eye, while the foreground is almost palpable in its 
reality. 

We must not regard either of the two main divisions of 
words as having the uniformity of a physical class. Even 
the presentive are more or less presentive ; while the sym- 
bohc have an infinitely graduated scale of variation. And yet 
there is no uncertainty resting over the basis of the dis- 
tinction here pointed out between presentive and symbolic. 

As a further illustration of this distinction it may be 
observed that a little more or less of the symbolic element 
has a great effect in stamping the character of diction. By 
a Httle excess of it we get the sententious or ' would-be wise ' 
mannerism. By a diminution of it we get an air of prompt- 
ness and decision, which may produce (according to circum- 
stances) an appearance of the business-like, or the military, 
or the off-hand. This is one of those observations which 
may best be justified by an appeal to caricatures of acknow- 
ledged merit. In the Pickwick Papers, the conversation 
of Mr. Samuel Weller the elder, a man of maxims and 
proverbs and store of experience, is marked by an occasional 
excess of the symbolic element. While ' you're a considering 
p 



210 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

of it ' he will proceed to suggest ' as how/ &c. On the 
other hand, the off-hand impudence of the adventurer Mr. 
Jingle, is represented by the artist mainly through this par- 
ticular feature, which characterizes his conversation through- 
out, namely, that it has the smallest possible quantity of 
symbolic words. 

To make it still more distinct what the symbolic character 
is, I add a paragraph in which the symbolic element is 
distinguished by italics. 

' There is a popular saying, in the Brandenburg district where Bismarck's 
family has been so many centuries at home, which attributes to the Bismarck s, 
as the characteristic saying of the house, the phrase, "Noch lange nicht 
genug'*' — " Not near enough yet" and which expresses, we suppose, the 
popular conception of their tenacity of purpose,-T-.'&a^ they were not tired out 
of any plan they had formed by a reiterated failure or a pertinacious opposi- 
tion which wotdd have disheartened most of their compeers. There is a some- 
what extravagant illustration of this characteristic m Bismarck's wild, youth- 
ful days, if his biographer may be trusted. When studying law at Berlin he 
had been more than once disappointed by a bootmaker who did not send home 
his boots when they luere promised. Accordingly whe?i this next happened, a 
servant of the young jurist appeared at the bootmaker's at six in the morning 
tuith the simple question, "Are Herr Bismarck's boots ready?" When he 
was told they were not, he departed, but at ten minutes past six another ser- 
vant appeared with the same inquiry, and so at precise intervals of ten minutes 
it went 071 all day, till by the evening the boots were finished and sent home* 

Doubt may sometimes arise concerning a particular word, 
when its signification lies on the confines of presentation and 
symbolism. In the above passage, I have let the word home 
stand once presentively, and twice I have marked it as 
symbolic. 

In English prose the number of symbolic words is gene- 
rally about sixty per cent, of the whole number employed, 
leaving forty per cent, for the presentives. A passage with 
many proper names and titles in it may, however, bring the 
presentives up to, or even cause them to surpass, the number 
of the symbolics. But the average in ordinary prose is what 
we have stated. 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 311 

' Mr. Ward sa3'-s very truly thai " the men and women of Pope's satires 
and epistles, his Atticus and Atossa, and Sappho and Sporus, are real types, 
whether thsy be more or less faithful portraits 0/ Addison arid the old Duchess, 
of Lady Mary and Lord Hervey. His Dunces are the Dunces of all times ; 
his orator Henley the mob orator, and his awful Aristarch the don, of all 
epochs ; though there may have been sotfie merit in Theobald, soine use even 
in Henley, a?id though ift Bentley there was undoubted greatness. Bjit in 
Pope's hands individuals become types, a7id his creative power i?i this respect 
surpasses that of the Roman satirists, and leaves Dryden hi7nself hehlnd." ' 

Out of J 15 words, we here find the unusually large number 
of fifty-four presentives, and the small proportion of sixty-one 
symbolics. But if we compare this with the previous para- 
graph, we observe that whereas the presentives are a new 
set of words, the symbolics are to a large extent identical 
in the two pieces. The symbolic words, though they hold 
so large a space in context, yet are but few in the whole 
vocabulary of the language. 

It would be a very interesting investigation, to examine 
whether the chief modern languages have any considerable 
diversity as to the bulk and composition of their symbolic 
element. For here it is that we must look for the matured 
results of aggregate national thought, in the case of the 
modern languages. The symbolic is the modern element — 
is, we might go so far as to say, the element which alone 
will give a basis for a philological distinction between ancient 
and modern languages. 

Not that any ancient languages are known which are 
absolutely destitute of this element. There is but one that 
I know, and that for the most part a very unwritten language, 
in which the symbolic has not yet been started. That is the 
language of infancy. Whoever has observed the shifts made 
by prattling children to express their meaning without the 
help of pronouns, will need no further explanation of the 
statement that infantine speech is unsymbolic. But I can- 
not refrain from establishing this important position by the 
p. 2 



212 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

widely independent testimony of such a philosopher as the 
late Professor Ferrier^ 

' In discussing the question, When does consciousness come into manifesta- 
tion ? we found that man is not born conscious ; and that therefore con- 
sciousness is not a given or ready-made fact of humanity. In looking for 
some sign of its manifestation, we found that it has come into operation 
whenever the human being has pronounced the word " I," knowing what 
this expression means. This word is a highly curious one, and quite an 
anomaly, inasmuch as its true meaning is utterly incommunicable by one 
being to another, endow the latter with as high a degree of intelligence as 
you please. Its origin cannot be explained by imitation or association. Its 
meaning cannot be taught by any conceivable process ; but must be origi- 
nated absolutely by the being using it. This is not the case with any other 
form of speech. For instance, if it be asked What is a table ? a person may 
point to one and say, " that is a table." But if it be asked, What does " I " 
mean? and if the same person were to point to himself and say "this is 
/," this would convey quite a wrong meaning, unless the inquirer, before 
putting the question, had originated within himself the notion " I," for it 
would lead him to call that other person " I.'" 

It is quite certain that ' I ' has its own special peculiarity, 
which may be said to distinguish it from every other form of 
speech. As a token of the dawn of consciousness in a child, 
the use of this word may claim some special attention. But 
in the main it is to be observed that the quality in this wo-rd 
which excited the professor's admiration, is a quality not 
peculiar to the pronoun ' I,' but of many other pronouns, 
if not of all pronouns as such. As a general rule, it is pro- 
bably with the pronoun ' I ' that the child first seizes the use 
of the symbolic element in speech. But it is not always 
so. In an instance which has been lately before me, a well- 
observed instance, supported moreover by conclusions from 
other less accurately noted cases, the pronoun ' I ' has been 
maturely acquired and in full use while the pronoun ' you ' 
was yet in the tentative stage. 

The difference so well demonstrated by Professor Ferrier, 
as separating the nature of the word ' I ' from that of the 

^ Lectures on Greek Philosophy and other Philosophical Remains of 
James Frederick Ferrier. Edited by Sir Alexander Grant, p. 252. 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 21^ 

word ' table/ is the difference which splits the whole voca- 
bulary into the two divisions of the presentive and the sym- 
bolic. A child does not understand any of the symbolic 
words at all. Where it uses them, it is by unconscious 
imitation. This happens particularly in the case of the 
prepositions, which are to the opening intelHgence not 
separate words at all, but mere appendages to the pre- 
sentives which they understand. 

We sometimes talk of the speech of animals. It is hardly 
possible to deny them all share in this faculty. They cer- 
tainly communicate their emotions by the voice. And this 
voice is not without discrimination. It is not to be sup- 
posed, for example, that they have merely a spontaneous 
and uniform utterance for each condition of feeling. The 
cry of the barn-door fowl at the sight of a fox or of a 
hawk is such as would tell an experienced person what was 
going on. The various accents of the Newfoundland dog, 
where he has a real understanding with his master, or of the 
collie among the sheep on the northern fells, are manifesta- 
tions wonderfully like inceptive speech ; and that everybody 
feels this to be so, is evidenced from the common meed of 
praise bestowed on a sagacious dog, that he all but talks. 

Whether the cries of animals are humble specimens of 
speech, or whether they are altogether different in kind, is 
hovvTver a question which we have not to solve. The sub- 
ject has only been introduced in order that it might afford 
us another point of view from which to contemplate the im- 
portant distinction between presentive and symbohc speech. 
If we estimate at its very highest the claims that can be 
made for the language of the beasts, it v/ill always be limited 
by the line which severs these two kinds of expression. We 
can imagine an orator on behalf of the animals maintaining 
that their cries might represent to other animals not only 



214 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

emotions but also objects of the outer sense or even objects 
reflected in the memory. We should not think a man quite 
unreasonable if he imagined that a certain whinny of a horse 
indicated to another horse as much as the word stable. But 
we should think him talking at random, if he pretended to 
be able to imagine that a horse's language possessed either 
a pronoun or a preposition. 

Here then we consider ourselves to touch upon that in 
human speech which bears the highest and most distinctive 
impress of the action of the human mind. Here we find 
the beauty, the blossom, the glory, the aureole of language. 
Here we seem to have found a means of measuring the 
relative progress manifested in different philological eras. 

Among ancient languages, that one is most richly furnished 
Vv'ith this element which in every other respect also bears off 
the palm of excellence. Dr. Arnold was not likely to have 
"written the following passage unless he had been sensible 
of a very high intellectual delight. 

' There is an actual pleasure in contemplating so perfect a management 
of so perfect an instrument as is exhibited in Plato's language, even if the 
matter were as worthless as the words of Italian music ; whereas the sense 
is only less admirable in many places than the language.' Life, i. 387. 

The admiration which is accorded on all hands to the 
Greek language is due to the exquisite perfection of its 
symbolic element. It is not that Ao'yo? or pj;,Ma or <^aivr] have 
any intrinsic superiority over ratio or verhwn or vox, that 
avr\p or avdpcoTTos is preferable to vi'r or /lomo ; nor is it even 
that the music, sweet as it may have been, reaches so effec- 
tually to the ear of the modern scholar as to carry him 
captive and cause him to forget the more audible march of 
Ausonian rhythms. No ; it all lies in the coyness of those 
little words whose meaning is as strikingly telling as it is 
impalpably subtle. It is those airy nothings which scholars 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 215 

have been chasing all these centuries ever since the revival 
of letters, every now and then, fancying they had seized 
them, till they were roused from their sweet delusion by the 
laughter of their fellow-idlers. The exact distinction between 
ixrj and ov, the precise meaning of av and cipa and S^ must 
forsooth be defined and settled ; and it is very possible that 
we have not yet seen the last of these futile lucubrations. 
These things will be settled when the truant schoolboy has 
bound the rainbow to a tree. 

As far back as 1829 Dr. Arnold wrote to a learned 
friend : — 

' And can you tell me where is to be found a summary of the opinions 
of English scholars about ojtojs and ottcus ^77, and the moods which they 
require: and further, do you or he hold their doctrine good for anything? 
Dawes, and all men who endeavour to establish general rules, are of great 
use in directing one's attention to points which one might otherwise have 
neglected ; and labour and acuteness often discover a rule, where indolence 
and carelessness fancied it was all hap-hazard. But larger induction and 
sounder judgment teach us to distinguish again between a principle and an 
usage : the latter may be general ; but if it be merely usage, grounded on no 
intelligible principle, it seems to me foolish to insist on its being universal, 
and to alter texts right and left, to make them all conformable to the canon.' 
Life, i. 241. 

There are still scholars who seek to render a firm reason 
for the Greek article in every place in which it occurs. But 
can they do so for their own language ? Can they say, for 
example, what is the value of the definite article which 
occurs three times in the following couplet ? 

'And to watch as the little bird watches 
When the falcon is in the air.' 

Where is the man who can handle language so skilfully 
as to describe and define the value of these articles .? He 
may say they are equivalent to such a word in Greek or to 
such a word in French, but he cannot render an account 
of what that value is. And yet this word was once a demon- 
strative pronoun, and it is time and use that has filed it 



2l6 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

down to this airy tenuity and delicate fineness. The sense 
would be affected by the absence of these little words, and 
yet it cannot be said that they are necessary to the sense. 
They seem to be at once nothing and something. The 
gold is beaten out to an infinitesimal thinness. Indeed, it is 
with language as with glory in Shakspeare's description : 

' Glory is like a circle in the water, 
Which never ceaseth to enlarge it selfe, 
Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught.' 

I Henry VI. i. 2, 133. 

It is painful to think how much good enthusiasm has been 
Avasted upon learning definitions which were not only unreal, 
but absolutely misleading as to the nature of the thing 
studied. So far from its being possible to define by rule 
the value of the Greek particles, it is' barely possible to cha- 
racterize them by a vague general principle. They vv^ere 
the product of usage, and usage is a compound made up of 
many converging tendencies, and that which was multitu- 
dinous in its sources continues to be heterogeneous in its 
composition. As usage produced it, so use alone can teach 
it. And this is why the skilled examiner will proceed to test 
a knowledge of Greek by selecting a passage not with many 
hard words in it, but with this symbolic element delicately 
exhibited. Hard and rare words are useful as a test whether 
the books have been got up, but even then the examination 
is no check on cramming. Whereas, it is a part of the dis- 
tinct character and peculiar iridescent beauty of the symbolic 
element that it cannot be acquired by sudden methods ; 
it can only be learnt by a process of gradual habituation, 
which is study in the true sense of the word, and which 
cannot fail to open the mind. You cannot tack on me- 
chanically a given English word to a given Greek word 
in the symbolic element, as you do in the presentive. 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. %\'] 

Symbolic words require different terms of rendering in dif- 
ferent connections. They have a diversity of states and 
powers and functions like living things. This is in each 
language the pith, the marrow, the true mother tongue. 
This is the element which is nearest of kin to thought, 
so that the efficiency of a writer or speaker depends largely 
on his power over it. In the following quotation from a 
review, see how the symbolics too much enable the writer 
just to hit off the vague idea in his mind. 

' Coleridge, though he was as much at home as any man could be in 
regions of mj'^stery, found " Christabel " too much for him, for that we sup- 
pose to be the natural explanation of its unfinished condition.' 

The following passage shews it well in Greek, and it is 
a passage borrowed from an Examination Paper. The 
symbolics are printed in thick type. 

'Eyw jxev oSv to-TC |X€v al airovlax T]o-av ov-TOxe l7rav6[xrjv fij-ias |A6»' 
oiKTiipojv, ^aaiXia St kaI totjs ijvv auroj fxaKapi^cov, diaOecuixevos o.vtS)V 
oortjv fjLtv x'^paj' Kal otav exot€v, ks Se dcpdova to, kiriTTfdeLa, occus 84 
OepdnovTas, ocraSc KT-qv-rj, -xpvadv Se, ecQTJTa Bs. To, S'avTwv arpaTLcaTWV 
OTTOTe ev6vixoifA.r]v otl t£»i' jJiev dyaOojv -irdvTcoi' gvB^vos tj[xiv [izTzir^, el fzi] 
TTpiaifxsOa, crov 5' dii'Tjaofi^Oa f/deiv oti okiyovq exovras, aXXnz Be -r-ws 
TTopi^eaOai to. kvir-qbeia r\ divov/xevovs opKovs 4]8ifj Karexovras -fjlJias' ravr' 
ovv Xoyi^ofxevos Iviore to,? airopSas [xaWov l(po^ov[xr]v fjvOv tcv nvX(- 
fiov. 'E:Tfl jJLevToi IksIvoi eXvaav rds atrovTsas kekvcOai \xc.i dofcei Kal 
Y) liceivcuv vfipLS Kal fj TjjA€T€pa vjToipia. — Xenophon, Anabasis, in. 

The symbolics in Latin are strikingly different from those 
in Greek. They differ as the flowers of the florist differ 
from those of nature. It is manifest to the eye that the 
symbolics in Greek have grown spontaneously, while their 
Latin analogues have a got-up and cultivated look. The 
modifying words especially, those which are sometimes 
roughly comprised under the term particles, look very much 
like scholastic products. A long period of Greek education 
preceded the Augustan age of the Latin language, and the 
symbolic part could not help getting an educated develop- 



2l8 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

ment, when the youth of successive generations had been 
daily translating their bits of Greek into the vernacular 
Latin. 

And although the symbolics in Latin are very effective 
when understood, yet it must be allowed that they are very 
hard to understand. This is the reason why a real Latin 
scholar, one who can command this title among scholars, is 
such a very rare personage. The symbolical element, which 
is to the mode of thought the essential element in every 
phrase in which it is present, did not grow of itself un- 
consciously and in the open air as in Greece, but it was the 
product of artificial elaboration and studied adaptation. And 
it still sits on the Latin Hke a ceremonious garment. The old 
native Latin, whose vitality and functionality was all but 
purely inflectional, springs out of its Greek disguise every 
now and then, and shows what it can do by its own natural 
armour. Look at the muscular collectedness of such 
sentence as beati mundo corde, and compare it in respect 
of the total absence of symbolics, either with the Greek 
MaKapiot ol KaBapol rfj Kapbia, or with the English Blessed are 
the pU7'e in heart. 

There spoke out the native and pre-classic Latin, a truly 
ancient language^ and one in comparison with which we 
must call the Greek truly modern. For that rich and free 
outflow of the symbolic which marks the Greek, is the 
badge and characteristic of modernism in language. On the i 
other hand, that independence of symbolics, and that power 
of action by complete inflectional machinery, which marks j 
the Latin, is the true characteristic and best perfection of | 
the ancient or pre-symbolic era. Not that our monuments [ 
reach back absolutely to a period when the symbolic ele- 
ment had yet to begin. Already in the Sanskrit, the 
symbolic verb is, than which nothing can be more purely 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. > 21 g 

symbolic, is in as full maturity as it is in our modern lan- 
guages. The latter have made more use of it, but the oldest 
languages of the Aryan race were already in possession of it. 
We learn from Professor Miiller, Lectures, ii. p. 349, that 
the Sanskrit root is as, 'which, in all the Aryan languages, 
has supplied the material for the auxiliary verb. Now, even 
in Sanskrit, it is true, this root as is completely divested of 
its material character ; it means io be, and nothing else. But 
there is in Sanskrit a derivative of the root as, namely dsu, 
and in this asu, which means the vital breath, the original 
meaning of the root as has been preserved, as, in order to 
give rise to such a noun as asu, must have meant to breathe, 
then to live, then to exist, and it must have passed through 
all these stages before it could have been used as the ab- 
stract auxiliary verb which we find not only in Sanskrit but 
in all Aryan languages.' 

But although we cannot pursue our research so far up 
into antiquity as to arrive 2X a station where inflections exist 
without symbolic words, yet we have sufficient ground for 
treating flexion as an ancient and symbolism as a modern 
phenomenon. One reason is, that in the foremost languages 
of the world, flexion is waning while symbolism is waxing. 
Another consideration is this, that after the growth of the 
symbolic element, the motive for flexion would no longer 
exist. 

We have every reason to anticipate in the future of the 
world's history, that symbolic will continue to develope, and 
that flexion will cease to grow. A widening divergence 
separates them at their hither end. But if we could take 
a look into that far distant antiquity in which they had their 
rise, we might perhaps find their fountains near each other 
if not absolutely identified in one well-head. I imagine 
that inflections are simply words which, having made some 



220 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

progress towards symbolism, and having lost accordingly 
in specific gravity, have been attracted by, and at length 
absorbed into, the denser substance of presentive words. 
This would account for the great start which flexion had 
over symbolic ; and yet we should understand how a marked 
and prominent symbolic word like is, charged with a sin- 
gular amount of vitality, should have found the opportunity 
to make a place for itself even as early as our highest 
attainable antiquity. 

Be this as it may, there are traces of a something which 
has the air of a family likeness between inflections and sym- 
bolic words. With a hint on this feature, we will close the 
chaptQi.-. 

The distinction between presentive and symbolic words 
is, I hope, tolerably clear to the reader. And also this — that 
presentive words have a tendency to become symbolic. And 
also this— that the process which changes them from pre- 
sentive to symbolic" is accompanied (unless other forces 
interfere) by a relative Hghtening of the vocal stress laid 
on them in a properly modulated discourse. To these 
observations we must add that the symboHc words are 
marked by a clinging adherent tendency to attach them- 
selves to other words ; and as this tendency will often force 
itself on our attention, we will, for brevity's sake, simply call 
it symphytism 

In the early period of our literature we see the symbolics 
growing on to their presentives and forming one word with 
them. In the case of the pronouns with the verbs this was 
very conspicuous in early English, as it was also in early 
German. The first personal pronoun /, which was anciently 
Ic, is found coalescing both before and after its verb. In 
the latter case the c is generally developed into ch. In the 
Canterbury Tales, 14362 ,^ 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 221 

' Let be, quod he ; it schal not be, so theech I ' 

Here theech is the coalition of thee ic, equivalent to the more 
frequent phrase, so mote I thee ; that is to say, ' So may I 
prosper ' (A.S. jjeon, to flourish, prosper). 

In the Owl and Nightingale (a.d. 1250) we find wenestu 
for wenest pu, weenest thou ; wultii, wilt thou ; shaltu, shalt 
thou; etestu, eatest thou. In Bamford's Dialect of South 
Lancashire, there is cudto, couldst thou.? cudtono, couldst 
thou not .? 

And not only does the pronoun adhere to its verb when 
it stands as subject to the verb. In the following west- 
country sentence the object-pronoun adheres : ' Telln, what 
a payth out, I'll payn agan ' — ' Tell him, what he pays out, 
I will pay him again.' Here the n represents the old accu- 
sative pronoun hine, which has been absorbed into the verb. 

The old negative ne coalesces with its verb ; thus — nelt for 
ne wilt ; navestu for ne havest pu, thou hast not ; nam for 
ne a7Ji = am not ; Ich 71am of-drad, I am not alarmed. 

The particle a coalesces very often ; as — 

' Awinter warm, asumere cold.' Owl and Nightingale. 

Two symbolics would run together like two drops of 
water on a pane of glass. The verb shall is often found 
making one word with be down as late as the seventeenth 
century. Thus, Isaiah xl. 4 : 

' Euery valley shalhe exalted, and euery niountaine and hill shalbe 
made low.' 

In King Lear, iv. 6, where Edgar assumes the character 
of a rustic, he says chill for / will, and chud for / wotdd or 
should, it may be doubted which. Here we have to under- 
stand that the first pronoun was pronounced as Ich, so that 
chill is just as natural a coalition of ich will as nill is of 
ne will. For this reference I am indebted to my friend the 



,222 OF PRESENTIVE AND SYMBOLIC WORDS, 

Rev. W. Williamson, of Fairstowe, who has also furnished 
me with the following : 

' Chill tell thee what, good veil owe, 
Before the vriers went hence, 
A bushell of the best wheate 
Was zold vor vourteen pence. 



Cham zure they were not voolishe 

That made the masse, che trowe : 
Why, man, 'tis all in Latine 

And vools no Latine knowe.' 

FtTcy's Reliques, ii. pp. 324, 325. 

CAam is for zcA am, I am. The same friend, having under- 
taken to look out for examples of this kind for me, writes 
to say that he has met with more than two hundred of these 
agglutinate forms, including such as ichave, hastow, imliu, 
dosiu, slepesiow, sechestu, wenestu, Szc. 

These examples are enough to prove that there is a dis- 
position in the symbolics to be drawn on to and to coalesce 
with their presentives, or with one another. The tendency 
is so decided in that direction that had there not been some 
great counteracting force it must have gone on happening 
on so large a scale as to have completely altered the appear- 
ance and character of the language. And this counteracting 
force is nothing more than the natural consequence of 
literary habits when they are widely diffused. From this 
cause has arisen a modern reaction in favour of the preser- 
vation of all words that are known to have had a separate 
individuality. This reaction has put a stop to these coalitions, 
and in some cases dissolved them where they had seemed . 
to be established. In the early prints of Shakspeare the con- 
versational abbreviation for / zai'Il is written Ik, but modern ' 
usage requires that the separate existence of each word 
should be kept up, and accordingly we write it /'//. The 
same movement, overshooting its aim, has, at least in one 



AND OF INFLECTIONS. 22^ 

instance, 'restored' a word to a present position which it 
never held in the past. The substitution of his for the pos- 
sessive 's, as in 'John his book/ and other well-known 
instances, was done by way of restoring the original ex- 
pHcitness of the language. It furnishes us with a strong 
illustration of the existence of that counter-force which 
restrains the tendency to a symphytic coalition. 

In fact the growth of symbolic words and the growth of 
inflections are naturally antagonistic to, and almost mutually 
exclusive of, each other. They are both made of the same 
material. They are the results of opposite states of the ag- 
gregate mind. If the attention of the community is fully 
awake to its language and takes an interest in it, no word 
can lose its independence. If language is used unreflectingly, 
the lighter words will get absorbed by those of greater 
weight, and then they pass into the dependent condition of 
inflections attached to the main words. Thus even Greek, 
our brightest ancient example of symbolism, produced con- 
glomerations in its obscure and neglected period, as Stamhoul 
(the modern name of Constantinople), which is a conglo- 
merate of Is Ty]v TTokiv. So also Stanchio or Stanko, a con- 
glomerate of es- r^v Kco, is the modern name for the island 
anciently known as Cos or Coos. For the passage of a 
word into the condition of an inflection, a certain neglect 
and obscurity is necessary ; while the requisite condition for 
the formation of a rich assortment of symbolics is a general 
and sustained habit of attention to the national Ian2:ua2;e. 



CHAPTER VI. 
THE VERBAL GROUP. 

The verb is distinguished from all other forms of speech 
by very marked characteristics and a very peculiar organiza- 
tion. It has surrounded itself with an assortment of sub- 
ordinate means of expression, such as are found in attend- 
ance on no other part of speech. The power of combining 
with itself the ideas of person, time, and all the various 
contingencies which we comprise under the term ' mood,' is 
a power possessed by the verb alone. It makes no dif- 
ference whether these accessory ideas are added to the verb 
by means of inflections or of symbolic words. The im- 
portant fact is this, — that under the one form or the other, the 
verb has such means of expression at its service in every 
highly organized language. 

The cause wherefore the verb is thus richly attended 
with its satellites becomes very plain when we consider 
what a verb is. A verb is a word whereby the chief action 
of the mind finds expression. The chief action of the mind 
is judgment; that is to say, the assertion or the denial of 
a proposition. This is explicitly done by means of the 
verb. Out of this function of the verb, and the exigencies 



THE VERBAL GROUP, 225 

of that function, have arisen the peculiar features and pre- 
rogatives of the verb. This part of speech has, by a natural 
operation, drawn around it those aids which were necessary 
to it for the discharge of its function as the exponent of the 
mental act of judgment. 

It will be useful to distinguish that which is essential to the 
verb, from that which is a result of its essential character. 
The power of expressing time by those variations which we 
call tense (after an old form of the French word for 'time'), has 
attracted notice as the most salient feature about the verb. 
Aristotle defined a verb as a word that includes in itself the 
expression of time. The established German word for a verb ^ 
is ^i\Uvoi)Xt, that is to say, * time-word.' Others have thought 
that the power of expressing action is the real and true cha- 
racteristic of the verb. Ewald, in his Hebrew Grammar, calls 
the verb accordingly 3^!^at=ti:ort, that is to say, ' deed-word.' 
But in these expressions the essential is obscured by that which 
is more conspicuous. Madvig, in his Latin Grammar, seems 
to me to put it in the right light. He designates the verb as 
Udsagnsord, that is, 'Outsayings-word' ; because it ' udsiger 
om en Person eller Ting en Tilstand eller en Virksomhed,' 
outsays (= pronounces, asserts, delivers) about a person or 
thing a condition or an action. — It is th§ instrument by 
which the mind expresses its judgments, or (in modern 
parlance) makes its deliverances. 

By reason of its central position, and by its constant and 
unsuspended action, the verb has a greater tenacity of form 
than any other part of speech. Hence it is that the most 
remarkable antiquities of the English language are to be 
found in the verb. It is in the verb that we find the Saxon 
forms best preserved, and that we find the most conspicuous 
proofs of the relationship of our language to the German and 
Dutch and Danish and Icelandic. In fact, it would be 
Q 



226 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

hardly too much to say, that a description of the elder verbs 
of any of these languages would with very slight alterations, 
pass for a description of the elder verbs of any one of the 
others. 

We must indeed admit one considerable exception to this 
statement. The feature which distinguishes the English 
verbs from those of the cognate languages is this, — that we 
have gone further than any of them in dropping the personal 
inflections. The German says Ich glaube, du glaubest, er 
glaubtj wir glauben, ihr glaubet, sie glauben. The English- 
man says, / believe, thou believest, he believes ; we believe, you 
believe, they believe. And as thou believest is but rarely used, 
much more rarely than du glaubest, and perhaps more rarely 
even than ihr glaubet, we have only the -s of the third 
singular he believes as the one personal inflection left in 
ordinary use among us. 

Particularly is it to be observed that we have lost the n of 
the plural present, which is preserved in the German form 
glaubcN. We know from the Latin sunt, amant, monent, 
regunt, audiunt, and from other sources, that nt was anciently 
a very wide-spread termination for the plural verb. This we 
see well preserved in the Moeso-Gothic verb, as may be seen 
in the following example of the present indicative of the 
verb for ' to believe,' galaubjan : — 



TSt. 


2nd. 


3rd. 


ingular galaubja 
lural galaubjam 


galaubeis 
galaubeith 


galaubaith 
galaubjand 



Here we have nd in the third person plural. In the Old 
High German it was as in Latin nt. The Germans have 
dropped the dental t and have kept the liquid n". We dropped 
the isr, or rather we merged it in a thicker vowel before, and 
a thicker consonant after. The plural termination -a^ of the ' 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 227 

Saxon present indicative is the analogue of the Gothic termi- 
nation -and. In the same manner an n has been absorbed 
in the English words tooth, goose, mouth, five, soft, which are 
in German ^<i\)Xi, @an§, SD'cunb, ?^iinf, @anft : also in sooth, 
which is in Danish sand. The following is the present in- 
dicative of the Saxon verb gelyfan, to believe : — 





1st. 


2nd. 


3rd. 


Singular 
Plural 


gelyfe 
gelyfaS 


gelyfest 
gelyfa« 


gelyfS 
gelyfaS 



Thus we never had an n in the third person plural of the 
present indicative, not even in the oldest stage of Saxon 
literature. For the past tense we retained it, and also for 
the subjunctive mood in all tenses. The consequence is, 
that in our early literature verbs abound with n in the 
third person plural, but never in the present tense. Thus 
Mark xvi. 13, and hig him ne gelyfdon, 'neither believed they 
them.' In Exodus iv. 5 we have the plural of the present 
subjunctive, pcet hig gelyfan, ' that they may believe.' In the 
former of these passages Wyclif has : And thei goynge toolden 
to other e J nethir thei Mleuyden to hem. 

It is one of the marks of Chaucer's severance from the old 
mother tongue that he does not observe this distinction, but 
uses the N-form of the plural even for the present indicative. 
In this, as in so many other points that have been noticed, 
that which was before prevalent was now made universal, 
and many nice distinctions were obliterated. 

' And smale foweles mahen melodye 
That slepen al the nyght with open lye 
So priketh hem nature in hir corages — 
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrymages.' 

The same thing may be seen in the quotation from 
Gower, above, p. 163. And this was retained as one of 
the recognised archaisms available only for poetical diction, 

Q 2 



2>2S THE VERBAL GROUP, 

and it long continued in the heroic or mock-heroic 
style, as we see in the following, from the eighteenth 
century. 

' In every village mark'd with little spire, 
Embower'd in trees and hardly known to fame, 
There dwells, in lowly shed and mean attire, 
A matron old, whom we Schoolmistress name. 
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame ; 
They grieven sore, in piteous durance pent, 
Aw'd by the power of this relentless dame, 
And oft times, on vagaries idly bent, 
For unkempt hair, or task unconn'd, are sorely shent.' 

William Shenstone (1714-1763), The Schoolmistress. 

In the ordinary paths of the language, however, the 
personal inflections were reduced nearly to their present 
simplicity before the Elizabethan epoch. 

The tenacity of which we spoke displays itself most con- 
spicuously in the tense-forms; that is to say, the forms 
used for expressing varieties of time. 

The boldest feature which is found among the verbs of 
our family, is the formation of the preterite by an internal : 
vowel-change, without any external addition. This character 
supplies a basis for the division of the verbs into three 
classes, — the Strong, the Mixed, and the Weak. 



I. Steong Veebs. 

The strong are of the highest antiquity, are limited in 
number, are gradually but very slowly passing away, as one by 
one at long intervals they drop out of use and are not recruited 
by fresh members. They are characterised by the internal 
formation of the preterite, and by the formation of the par- 
ticiple in N. This latter feature has however been less con- 
stant than the preterite. The following list comprises most 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 



IK) 



of them. Only those forms which are given in the ordinary 
type are in full use. Those in i&lacfe \tiitx flourished in me- 
diaeval times ; those in thick type are chiefly of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries ; ,and those in italics are negligent 
forms which were mostly current in the eighteenth century. 
The few which are in small capitals are Saxon forms. 
Those in spaced type are from a collateral language or 
dialect. 

Only the simple verbs are given, and not their compounds. 
The Hst contains come, hold, get; but not become, behold, beget; 
bid but not forbid; give but not forgive, &c. On the other 
hand, those compounds whose simples no longer exist in the 
language, are here given, as abide, begin, forsake. 



'RESENT. 


PRETERITE, 


PARTICIPLE. 


abide 


abode 


[a]bidden* 


bake 


beuk* 


baken 


bear 


bore, bare 


borne and born 


beat 


beat 


beaten, beat 


begin 


began 


begun 


BELGAN 


BEAIH 


BOLGEN, bOWln * 


BEON 




been 


bid 


bade, bid 


bidden, bid 


bind 


bound 


bounden, bound 


bite 


bote *, bit 


bitten, bit 


blow 


blew 


blown 


bow 


BEAH 


bowne* 


break 


broke, brake 


broken 


burst 


burst 


bursten, burst 


carve 


mrf* 


CORFEN 


cast 


coost * 


casten * 


chide 


chid, chode * 


chidden, chid 


choose 


chose 


chosen 


cleave 


clove, clave 


cloven 


climb 


clomb 




cling 


clung 


clung 


come 


came 


comen*, come 



230 



THE VERBAL GROUP, 



PRESENT. 


PRETERITE. 


PARTICIPLE. 


creep 


crope*, crap* 


croptn*, cruppen 


crow 


crew 




delve 


tfalf c * 


dolven 


dig 


dug 


dug 


draw 


drew 


drawn 


drink 


drank, drunk 


drunken*, drunk 


drive 


drove 


driven 


eat 


ate 


eaten 


fall 


fell 


fallen, fell* 


fight 


fought 


fought, fougMen* 


find 


found 


found 


fling 


flung 


flung 


fly 


flew 


flown 


forsake 


forsook 


forsaken 


freeze 


froze 


frozen 


get 


got, gat 


gotten, got 


give 


gave 


given 


glide 


gloti* 




gnaw 


gnew* 


gnawn* 


go 




gone 


GRAFE 


GROF 


graven * 


grind 


ground 


ground 


grow 


grew 


grown 


heave 


hove 




help 


holp 


holpen, holp * 


hing* 




hung 


hold 


held 


holden * 


lade 




laden, loden * 
lorn 


lie 


lay 


lain, lien * 


melt 




molten 


plat 


plet* 




ride 


rode, rid * 


ridden, rid 


ring 


rang, rung 


rung 


rise 


rose 


risen, rose * 


run 


ran 


run 


seethe 


sod* 


sodden 


shake 


shook 


shaken, shooh * 


shape 


shope 


shapen 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 



23 E 



PRESENT. 


PRETERITE. 


PARTICIPLE. 


shave 


. • • 


shaven 


shear 


shore 


shorn 


shew 




shewn 


shine 


shone 


shone 


shoot 


shot 


shotten * 


shrink 


shrank, shrunk 


shrunken, shrunk 


sing 


sang, sung 


sung 


singe 




sung* 


sink 


sank 


sunken, sunk 


sit 


sau, sat 


sttten 


slay- 


slew 


slain 


slide 


Slotl *, slid 


slidden, slid 


sling 


slang *, slung 


slung 


slink 


slunk \ 


slunk 


slit 


slat, slit 


slit 


smite 


smote 


smitten 


speak 


spoke, spake 


spoken, spoke * 


spin 


span 


spun 


spring 


sprang 


sprung 


steal 


stole 


stolen 


stick 


stuck 


stuck 


sting 


stung 


stung 


stink 


stank and stunk 


stunk 


STRICAN 


STRAC 


stricken or striken 


stride 


strode 


stridden 


strike 


struck 


stricken 


string 


strung 


strung 


strive 


strove 


striven 


swear 


swore, sware 


sworn 


swell 


stwal 


swollen 


swim 


swam 


swum 


swing 


swung 


swung 


take 


took 


taken, took * 


tear 


tore, tare 


torn 


thrive 


throve 


thriven 


throw 


threw 


thrown 


tread 


trod 


trodden, trod 


wake 


woke 




wash 


wush (Scots) 


washen 



232 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 



PRESENT, 


PRETERITE. 




PARTICIPLE, 


wax 


iD£I 




waxen * 


wear 


wore 




worn 


weave 


wove 




woven 


WESAN 


was 




[Germ, gewesen] 


win 


won 




won 


wind 


wound 




wound 


wreak 






ywroken * 


wring 


wrung 




wrung 


write 


wrote, wrat*, 


writ 


written, writ, wrote 



Remarks on the Forms signed with an Asterisk. 

[ajbidden. We find the simple form in Eger and Grine, 
line 555 :— 

' He might full well haue bidden att home.' 

beuk. Gentle Shepherd, act ii. sc. i. 

bowln. A relic of a forcible word in Saxon poetry, gebol- 
GEN = ' swollen,' generally with anger, It is found in Surrey's 
Translation of the Second Book of the Aeneid, and there it 
simply means physically swollen : — 

' Distained with bloody dust, whose feet were howln 
With the strait cords wherewith they haled him.' 

bote. Eger and Grine, 992. 
bowne. 

' And now he is bowne to turne home againe.' 

Eger and Grine, 948. 

Here also must be put the expression ' Homeward bound ' 
— though there is a great claim for the Icelandic buinn. 

t&xi. ' And carf biforn his fader at the table.' 

Chaucer, Prologue, loO. 

chode. Genesis xxxi. 36; Numbers xx. 3. 

COOSt. 'Maggie coost her head fu' high. 

Looked asklent and unco skeigh, 
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh.' 

Robert Burns, Duncan Gray^ 



THE VERBA L GROUP. 



^?>?> 



casten. As in the quotation from Surrey, above, p. 126. 
comen. Spenser, Faerie Queene, iv. i. 15, overcommen. 

'And if thou be comen to fight with that knight,' 

Eger atid Grine, 887. 

crop?, fropcn. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 4257, 11918. 
crap. Gentle Shepherd, act v. sc. i. 
cruppen. The Antiquary. 

tialfc. Quoted by Richardson from Chaucer, Boecius, Bk. IL 
drunken. Luke xvii. 8. 
fell, participle. 

' Which thou hast perpendicularly fell.' 

King Lear, iv. 6. 54. 

fougMen. 

' On the foughten field 
Michael and his Angels prevalent 
Encamping.' Paradise Lost, vi. 410. 

gloti, for glided. Poem 0/ Genesis and Exodus., 76. 
gnew. In Tyndale, Prologue to the Prophet Jonas (Parker 
Society, p. 456), we ^Yid^ gnew as the preterite oi gnaw. 

' Whereupon for very pain and tediousness he lay down to sleep, for to 
put the commandment, which so gnew and fretted his conscience, out of 
mind ; as the nature of all wicked is, when they have sinned a good, to 
seek all means with riot, revel, and pastime, to drive the remembrance of 
sin out of their thoughts ; or, as Adam did, to cover their nakedness 
with aprons of pope-holy works.' 

gnawn. Shakspeare : ' hegnawn with the bots,' Taming of 
the Shrew, iii. 2. . The Saxon form was gnagen. 

graven. Psalm vii. 16, elder version, 'He \i2.\h. graven and 
digged up a pit.' And often ' graven image ' in the Bible 
of 161 1. 

holp, participle. Shakspeare, Richard II, v. 5. 62. 

hing. This form lingers still in Scotland, if we may so con- 
clude from a story in Dean Ramsay, who puts it into the 



334 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

mouth of a Scotch judge of the last generation. [I am 
assured, on good authority, that it is quite common to 
this day.] 

This verb made an early transit to the weak form, and 
was conjugated thus : hang, hanged, hanged. Properly 
speaking, this was a new and quite different verb, and 
should have had the transitival use, while the strong 
hing, hang, hung, kept the neuter function. There are 
extant traces of the observance of this principle. Thus, 
nobody says that his hat hanged on a peg. But as nothing 
can restrain the caprice of speech, this early broke rule, 
and the young weak form hanged, stood for the neuter • 
sense. Example : — 

' But could not finde what they might do to him : for all the people 
hanged vpon him when they heard him,' — Luke xix. 48. Geneva, 1557' 

holden. Psalm Ixiii. 9, elder version : and eleven times in 

the authorized version of the Bible. 
loden. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, 1581 ; 

ed. Edward Arber, p. 19. 
lien. ' Though ye have lien among the pots, &c.,' Ps. Ixviii. 

13, elder version. Shakspeare, King John, iv. i. 50, 

where the first three folios spell it lyen. 
plet. 

* I took delyte 
To pou the rashes green, wi' roots sae white; 
O' which, as weel as my young fancy cou'd, 
For thee I plet the flow'ry belt and snood.' 

Allan Ramsay, Gentle Shepherd, act ii. sc. 4. 

rid. 

' I remember two young fellows who rid in the same squadron of a 
troop of horse.' Spectator, Aug. 24, 1711. 

This form is in present use in Somersetshire and Glouces- 
tershire : 
' He walked all the way there, Sir : but he rid home again.' (Swanswick.) 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 235 

I find this preterite also in a quotation by Mr. Fur- 
nivall ^ from Journey of Irish Gentlemen through England 
in 1752: 'We set out in our' post-chaise ; Valerius and I 
rid as before.' 

rose. 

' And I was ta'en for him, and he for me ; 
And thereupon these errors are arose.' 

Comedy of Errors, v. I. 386. 

sod. Genesis xxv. 29. 

shook. The preterite form was much adopted for the par- 
ticiple from the seventeenth to the early part of the 
present century. Thus Milton, Paradise Lost, vi. 219: — 

' All Heaven 
Resounded, and had Earth been then, all Earth 
Had to her Center shook.' 

And Edmund Burke, while at Dublin College, writing to 
an old schoolfellow, says, — 

' You ask me if I read ? I deferred answering ,this question, till I could 
say I did ; which I can almost do, for this day I have shook off idleness 
and begun to buckle to.' (March, 1746-7.) 

And Samuel Taylor Coleridge : — 

' For oh ! big gall-drops shook from Folly's wing 
Have blackened the fair promise of my spring.' 

shotten. 

' In that nooke-shotten He of Albion.' 

Shakspeare, Henry V, iii. 5. 14. 

Compare cup-shotten, Cotgrave, s. v. Vvre. Probably also 

FalstaiFs ' shotten herring ' belongs here, 
sung, participle oi singe, Gentle Shepherd, act ii. sc. i. 
•Sloti. Trevisa. 
slang. I Samuel xvii. 49. 



^ A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chancers Canterbury 
Tales, p. 16. 



236^ THE VERBAL GROUP. 

spoke^ participle. In Shakspeare, King John, iv. i . 51; King 
Richard II /\. 1. 77. 

stricken. This old participle, meaning gone, advanced, is 
now quite extinct. We read it in Luke i. 7, 'well stricken 
in years;' and we retain it in the compound poverty- 
stricken, which TCiQ2iW?, far gone in poverty^ extremely poor. 
In Sidney's Arcadia (ed. 1599), p. 5, we read, 'He being 
already well striken in years.' 

took. See what has been said under shook. 

' Too divine to be xaistooh.' 

Milton, Arcades. 

waxen. Jeremiah v. 27, 28: 'They are become great and 

waxen rich. They are waxen fat, they shine.' 
ywroken, Spenser, Colijt Clouts come home againe, 921 : — 

' Through judgement of the gods to been ywroken.^ 

wrat. This preterite form occurs in Raleigh's (Edwards, 

Letter xv.) correspondence under date May 29, 1586: 

' And the sider which I wrat to you for.' 
wrote. ' I have wrote to you three or four times.' Spectator, 

No. 344. (1712) 

Notwithstanding the tenacity of which we have spoken 
there is a manifest tendency in these strong verbs to merge 
themselves gradually into the more numerous class of the 
weak verbs. Many have dropped their strong form since 
Saxon times, and adopted the weak. Thus the verb to 
wreak was anciently conjugated, — 



but it has long ago adopted the more prevalent form in -ed. 
Thus Smollett (quoted by Richardson) : ' I wreaked my 
resentment upon the innocent cause of my disgraces.' 



THE VERBAL GROUP, 



237 



Other examples of Saxon strong verbs which have been 
altered: 



acwele 

bace 

beorge 

brede 

bruce 

buge 

byrne 

ceowe 

climbe 

crawe 

creope 

delfe 

dufe 

fealde 

fleote 

frete 

geote 

glide 

grafe 

hele 

hieape 

hreowe 

leoge 

luce 

mete 

murne 

reoce 

rowe 

scufe 

scyppe 

slape 

smeoce 

spume 

steorfe 

swelge 

teoge 

persce 

|)ringe 

wade 

wealde 



PRETERITE. 

acwsel 

boc 

bearh 

braed 

breac 

beah 

barn 

ceaw 

clomm 

creow 

creap 

dealf 

deaf 

feold 

fleat 

frset 

geat 

glad 

grof 

hsl 

hleop 

hreaw 

leah 

leac 

mset 

mearn 

reac 

reow 

sceaf 

scop 

slep 

smeac 

spearn 

stserf 

swealh 

teah 

}>ssrsc 

>rang 

wod 

weold 



PARTICIPLE. 



acwolen 
bacen 


quell 
bake 


borgen 
broden 


borrow 
braid 


brocen 


brook 


bogen 
burnen 


bow 
burn 


gecowen 
dumb en 


chew 
climb 


crawen 


crow 


cropen 
dolfen 


creep 
delve 


dofen 


dive 


fealden 

floten 

freten 

goten 

gliden 

grafen 

holen 


fold 

float 

fret 

yote ( = pour) 

glide 

grave 

heal 


hleapen 
hrowen 


leap 
rue 


logen 
locen 


lie (mentiri) 
lock 


meten 


mete or measure 


mornen 


mourn 


rocen 


reek 


rowen 


row 


scofen 


shove 


sceapen 

slapen 

smocen 


shape 
sleep 
smoke 


sponien 
storfen 


spurn 
starve 


swolgen 


swallow 


togen 
|5orscen 


tow 
thresh 


gej^rungen 
waeden 


throng 
wade 


gewealden 


wield 



This list does not include the strong verbs that have alto- 
gether died out since Saxon times. It only contains those 



238 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

ancient strong verbs which still exist in the language under 
weak forms. The list is of practical utility for reference in 
reading Chaucer or the Elizabethan writers. Many a strong 
form, now unfamiliar to us, lingers in their pages. The 
verb mete, to measure, is one that we do not often use at 
all, for the whole root is, as Webster says, obsolescent. 
In our Bible it has the weak conjugation, as — 

' A nation meted out and troden downe.' Isaiah xviii. 2. 

' Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand ? and meted 
out heauen with the spanne, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a 
measure, and weighed the mountaines in scales, and the hilles in a balance ? ' 
Isaiah xl. 12. 

But in Chapman's Iliad, iii. 327, we find the strong preterite 
of this verb : 

' Then Hector, Priam's martial son, stepp'd forth, and met the ground.' 
In some cases slight relics of the old strong conjugation 
are still preserved, though the verb itself has gone off into 
the weak or mixed form. Thus the verb to lose is now 
declined, lose, lost, lost. But in Saxon it was 

leose leas loren 

and from this ancient conjugation we have retained the 
participle as an adjective, lorn, forlorn. Its participial use 
may be seen as late as Milton, Paradise Lost, x. 921, — 

' My only strength and stay : forlorn of thee, 
Whither shall I betake me, where subsist ? ' 

Some of these strong forms, which are now quite strange 
to us, existed down to a comparatively late date. In a 
Romance of the date 1450 or later, we have shof as a pre- 
terite, where we now use shoved : ' And he shof ther-on so 
sore that he bar hym from his horse to the grounde.' 
Merlyn (Early English Text Society), p. 265. 

To set against this gradual defection of strong verbs 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 239 

towards the prevalent form, we rarely find even a slight 
example of movement in the opposite direction. New verbs 
are hardly ever added to the ranks of the strong ; whatever 
verb is invented or borrowed is naturally conjugated after 
the prevalent pattern. A marked exception to this rule, all 
the more conspicuous on account of its rarity, is the Scottish 
formula of verdict, Not proven. Here we have a French 
verb which has taken the form of a strong Gothic participle. 
Sometimes a weak verb is treated as a strong, half play- 
fully. But expressions which have had their rise in froHc, 
are sometimes repeated so often that they become esta- 
blished, at least so far as to get into print. Thus we find 
pled as the preterite of the verb to plead, in the Contemporary 
Review, April, 1869, p. 602 : — 

' The well-known story of the presbyter deposed from his office for 
forging the Acts of Paul and Thecla, although he pled that he had done 
so from the love of Paul.' 

I do not know whether 

dive dove 

is recognised on the yonder side of the Atlantic, but I rather 
suppose the following is merely a passing fancy of the 
author. 

I know not why, but the whole herd [of walruses] seemed suddenly to 
take alarm, and all dove down with a tremendous splash almost at the same 
instant.' Dr. Hayes, Open Polar Sea, ch. xxxvi. 

But the member of this class which above all others de- 
mands our attention is the substantive verb to be : or rather, 
the fragments of two or three ancient verbs which join to 
fill the place of the substantive verb. The ' substantive verb ' 
is so called, not from any association with or derival from the 
part of speech called a substantive ; but for a distinct reason. 
It is the verb which expresses least of all verbs ; for it ex- 
presses nothing but to have existence. Every other verb implies 
existence besides that particular thing which it asserts : as, 



ri40 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

if I say / think, I imply that I am in existence, or else I 
could neither think nor do anything else. The verb sub- 
stantive, then, is the verb which, unlike all other verbs, con- 
fines itself to the assertion of existence, which in all other 
verbs is contained by implication. The Greek word for 
existence or being was ova-ia, and this was done into Latin 
by the word substantia, and by this avenue did the verb 
which predicates nothing but existence come to be named 
the substantive verb. 

It seems so natural and easy to say that a thing is or was 
or has been, that we might almost incline to fancy the sub- 
stantive verb to be the oldest and most primitive of verbs. 
But there is more reason for thinking contrariwise, that it 
was a mature and comparatively late product of the human 
mind. The French word /// for been, is not an old word : 
we know its history. It is derived from stare, the Latin 
word for standing, as is witnessed by stato, the Italian par- 
ticiple of the substantive verb. And in many other cases 
the substantive verb is of no very obscure origin. We 
seem to be able to trace our word be, for example, by 
the help of the Latin fui and the Greek <^va>, to the 
concrete sense of growing. It has even been thought, 
and not at all unreasonably, that the stock of our be 
may be no other than that familiar verb for building and 
dwelling which in Scotland is to big, in Icelandic is bua, 
and which appears in the second member of so many of our 
Danish town-names in the form of by, as Whitby, Rugby. 
In Icelandic 'bua bui sinu,' is to 'big ane's ain bigging,' 
i.e. to have one's own homestead \ In these cases, the 
concrete sense of growing or standing, or building or dwell- 
ing, has been as it were washed or worn out of the verb, and 
nothing left but the pale underlying texture of being. 

* Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson, v. Biia. 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 24I 

The great master of Oriental philology, Ewald, seems to 
think that the Hebrew substantive verb HM was developed 
from an ancient root meaning ' to make, prepare.' 

In Sanskrit, as the substantive verb, has been developed 
from a root signifying fo breathe, and it seems probable that 
this was the original sense of the Greek eVrt, the Latin est, 
the German ift, and our is. This has been explicitly stated 
in a previous chapter, p. 219. Here we catch a glimpse of 
the antiquity of our modern languages,, and also of the pro- 
cess by which the most familiar instruments of speech have 
been prepared for their present use. 

As the presentive noun fades or ripens into the symbol 
pronoun ; as the pronoun passes into the still more subtle 
conjunction, — so also do verbs graduate from particular to 
general use, from such a particular sense as stand ox grow 
or breathe, to the large and general sense of being. Nor 
does the trans-animation stop here. 

It is not when this verb expresses absolute existence that 
it has reached its highest state of refinement. When Cole- 
ridge said ' God has all the power that is/ he made this 
verb a predicate of existence. In this case the verb to be 
has still a concrete function, and is a presentive word : but 
in its state of highest abstraction it is equally in place in 
every proposition whatever, and is the purest of symbols. 
We can express ' John runs ' by ' John is running ; ' and 
every proposition is capable of being rendered into this 
form. The verb substantive here exhibits the highest pos- 
sible form of verbal abstraction. It is the mere instrument 
of predication, and conveys by itself no idea whatever. It 
is the most symbolic of all the symbolic verbs, and it is 
symbolised to the utmost that is possible. For it expresses 
only that which every verb must express in order to be 
a verb, viz. the mental act of judgment. 



^4^ THE VERBAL GROUP. 



The Substantive- and Symbol-Veeb. 

Indicative present am, art, is : are. 

„ past was, wast, was : were. 

Infinitive, imperative, and 1 

subjunctive present : j ' 

Subjunctive past were, wert, were : were. 

Participle present being. 

„ past been. 

It should be observed that the substantive verb has been 
more tenacious of the personal forms than verbs in general, 
and that the remarks in the beginning of this chapter about 
the disuse of the personal forms are much less applicable 
here. Until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries there was 
a larger variety of these forms, among which may be spe- 
cified the N-forms of the third person plural, am and weren. 

The following is from one of the versified precepts of 
good manners which are so frequent in the literature of the 
fifteenth century. 

' Thus God ])at is begynnere & former of alle thyng. 
In nombei', weygllt, & mesure alle J)is world wrought he ; 
And mesure he taugllte us in alle his wise werkis, 
Ensample by the extremitees ])at vicious am euer.' 

That is to say : Extremes are always wrong. 

This is, however, a matter of small importance in com- 
parison with another remark which must here be made. 
The symbol-verb is not all of one root, it is a verbal con- 
jugation made up of several roots. For, not to determine 
anything about the origin of am, art, and are, it is plain 
that besides these we have here the fragments of two verbs, i 
whose infinitives in Saxon were beon and wesan. Our i 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 24$ 

present infinitive to de is from the former. In German the 
latter is retained as a neuter noun ba§ 2Befen, a word much 
used for being, existence, substance, essence. It is for the 
German language, not indeed a substantive-verb, but a ' sub- 
stantive-noun.' Also they have from the same source 
geiiDefett, the participle of their symbol-verb. But these are 
not the only roots which in our language have exercised 
this symbolic power. 

There is another substantive-verb in English, which is 
now rarely used, and only in poetry. It is the verb wor/k 
=be. It belongs to the older form of our language, rather 
than to modern English. In Saxon it was thus conjugated : 
WEOB^AN, WEAR^, GEWOEDEN". The wholc vcrb is still in 
full force in German : tt^erben, n?arb, getx)orben. But with us 
it was already archaic in Chaucer's time. It is but rarely 
found in his writings. The participial form occurs in his 
Troilus and Cresside, where he is saying of love between the 
sexes, that without it 

'No lifes wiht is worth or may endure,' 

i.e. No living thing has come into being (ift gettjorben) or can 
escape extermination. 

In this place it is the participle. But the form in which 
it is most generally known is the imperative or subjunctive- 
imperative : as. Wo worth this day ; that is, ' Woe be to this 
day ; ' as Ezekiel xxx. 2, and in The Lady of the Lake, — 

' Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day ; 
That cost thy Ufe, my gallant grey.' 

We find the infinitive in the Coke's Tale of Gamelyn : 

' Cursed mot he worthe bothe fleisch and blood, 
That ever do priour or abbot ony good ! ' 

In the following quotation from the Creed of Piers Plough- 



244 I' HE VERBAL GROUP. 

man, 744, we have the infinitive twice, and once with the 
ancient termination : — 

* Now mot ich soutere his sone • setten to schole 
And ich a beggers brol • on J^e booke lerne, 
And tvor\> to a writere • & wi\> a lorde dwell, 
OJ?er falsly to a frere • \)e fend for to seruen ! 
So of ])at beggers brol • a bychop schal wor]>en.' 

Translation. — Now each cobbler may set his son to school, and every 
beggar's brat may learn on the book and become a writer and dwell with 
a lord ; or iniquitously become a friar, the fiend to serve ! So of that 
beggar's brat, a bishop shall be made, &c. 

In Shakspeare we find this verb played off against the 
substantive wor/A : ' Her worth worth yours ; ' that is, in 
Latin, ' Ejus meritum fiat vestrum/ — The edition of Messrs. 
Clark and Wright, vol. i. p. 387, where may be seen the 
conjectures which this passage has provoked. 

In this place we consider the symbol-verb only as a phe- 
nomenon and 2, product of speech. The production of this 
particular word is to the verb-system what the leader is 
to a tree. Cut it off, and the tree will try to produce 
another leader. If we could imagine the whole elaborate 
system of verbs to be utterly abolished from memory and 
consigned to blank oblivion, insomuch that there remained 
no materials for speech but nouns, pronouns, and the rest, 
the verb would yet grow again, as surely as a tree when 
it is cut down (unless it die) will sprout again. The verb 
would form itself again, and it would repeat its ancient 
career, and the topmost product of that career would be as 
before, the symbol-verb to he. Proof enough of this will be 
seen in the fact that many roots have in our stock of lan- 
guages made a run for this position ; and in the further fact 
that languages whose development has been wide of ours, 
as the Hebrew, have culminated in the selfsame result — the 
substantive-verb and out of it the symbol-verb. In the third 



THE VERBAL GROUP, 24S 

section of the Syntax we shall have to consider this symbol- 
verb in some of the effects which it has caused. 

Such are the strong verbs and the symbol-verbs which 
they have produced. 

We cannot close this section without a few words of 
comment. The venerable sire of Gothic philology, Jacob 
Grimm, has said of the strong preterites that they constitute 
one of the chief beauties of our family of languages (' eine 
haupt-schonheit unsrer sprachen'). In this sentiment all 
philologers seem agreed. The prefaces and other critical 
apparatus of the volumes of the Early English Text Society 
afford abundant testimony to the fact that this feature has 
a peculiar attraction for those who are seeking to penetrate 
the mysteries of language. To those volumes we refer our 
readers for a rich collection of details for which the present 
manual has not sufficient space. 

The question naturally rises, How did so very singular 
a contrivance come into existence ? The question is put 
here, not so much for the sake of the answer that can now 
be given, as for the purpose of directing the student to those 
enquiries which will supply a definite and practical aim to 
his more extended investigations. It has been surmised by 
Grimm that the origin of this internal and vocalic change 
is to be sought in reduplication. He particularly instances 
the preterite hzgh/, which in the Saxon form was kef, with 
an older form occasionally used kekf, and which in Gothic 
was hdihdit. Gothic Gospels, Luke xiv. 10, 16. This from 
the root hat (infinitive haian) looks exceedingly like as if a 
reduplication of the root had by some sort of compensation 
got simplified at length into the form het. The German 
ging, preterite of the verb go, has again a form which 
(though there is another way of explaining it) might easily 
have been produced by a reduplication of the root. But 



2,46 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

next to hehf, there is no example so striking as that of the^ 
verb to do, which is strong by its participle done, and yet in 
its preterite has the appearance of a weak form. It is re- 
deemed from this anomalous inconsistency by supposing 
dyde, the Saxon form of did, to be a reduplication of the 
root do, and so of a piece with the strong preterites, only 
less altered. The probability of this explanation is height- 
ened by a comparison of the very similar phenomenon 
among nouns. A few nouns, and those concerning some 
of the most familiar objects, form their plurals much as the 
strong verbs form their preterites. Examples : — man, men ; 
foot, feet ; mouse, mice. In the case of the nouns it is very- 
easy to imagine that in the primitive poverty of flexion, 
plurality might have been expressed (it may also be said 
that in certain instances at least plurality was expressed) 
by mere repetition of the noun, which is the parent of redu- 
plication. It is not quite so plain a thing to see that any 
analogy exists between plural number and past time. There 
may not be any outward logical analogy, and yet there may 
be an inward mental affinity. But if we leave plurality, and 
come back to our preterites, we see as a matter of fact that 
reduplication has been resorted to as a means of expressing 
past time, in the development both Of the Latin and of the 
Greek verb. Latin instances are didici, poposci, ietigi, pepuli. 
But in Greek the most conspicuous instrument for the 
expression of past time is reduplication : rervcfja, rervfiixaL ; 
neTTOLT]Ka, TrenoiTjfiai ; nerrpaxa, Tvirrpayfxai ', TereXeKa, reTeXeaiiai. 

II. Mixed Veebs. 

The second class of verbs are those which may con- 
veniently be called Mixed, because they unite in themselves 
something of the features of the first and third classes. 



THE VERBAL GROUP. ^47 

Some philologers would deny them the distinction of 
being a class at all. They would insist that there are but 
two principles at work in the verb-flexions ; namely, internal 
change and external addition. And this is the fact. But 
then, the variety of relations in which two systems are ranged 
may easily give rise to a third series of conditions. When 
the sun peers through the foliage of an aged oak, it pro- 
duces on the ground those oval spots of dubious Hght 
which the poet has called a mottled shade. Each oval has 
its own outline and its own particular degree of luminous- 
ness ; but where two of them overlap each other a third 
condition of light is induced. Such an overlapping is this 
sample of mixed verbs, a compromise between the strong 
and the weak. 

In the formation of the preterite, they suffer both internal 
vowel-change, and also external addition. They form the 
participle in t or d. Such are the following : — 



PRESENT, 


PRETERITE. 


PARTICIPLE. 


bring 


brought 


brought 


buy 


bought 


bought 


catch 


caught 


caught 


creep 


crept 


crept 


deal 


delt 


delt 


feel 


felt 


felt 


fetch 


fot 




•flee 


fled 


fled 


hear 


herd 


herd 


keep 


kept 


kept 


kneel 


knelt 


knelt 


lean 


lent 


lent 


leap 


lept 


lept 


leave 


left 


left 


lose 


lost 


lost 


mean 


ment 


ment 


meet 


met 


met 


pitch 


pight 




reach 


raught 


raught 


[reave] 


reft 


reft 


seek 


sought 


sought 



1248 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 



RESENT. 


PRETERITE. 


PARTICIPLE. 


«ell 


sold 


sold 


shoe 


shod 


shod 


shriek 


st)rig]^t 




sife 


sigbte ( = sighed) 




skep 


slept 


slept 


sp£t, spit 


spet, spate 


spott 


stand 


^stood 


stood 


sweep 


swept 


swept 


teach 


taught 


taught 


tell 


told 


told 


think 


thought 


thought 


weep 


wept 


wept 


wot 


■wist 




work 


wrought 


wrought 



The preterite wist is sometimes referred to a present / wis. 
But I should like to hear it ably discussed whether there is 
or ever was such a verb as I wis. It is in fact almost a 
metaphysical problem. It is something like the question 
whether pas and point in French are negative particles or 
only adverbs. Whether there ever was such a verb as 
' I wis ' is one of the problems of English philology. Cer- 
tainly Spenser believed there was, and in the century before 
him it was believed. The verb is really a myth. It grew 
out of a change in the conception of an old adverb gewis 
(German getuigg to this day) which became a stock word for 
the close of lines in the form iwis,ywis, I wis^ I wiss, &c., 
and then the old preterite wiste helped out the grammatical 
conception. 

In a few instances, such as 'mean, meant, meant,' the 
ordinary spelling has been departed from in order to exhibit 
to the eye as well as to the ear that there is a change in the 
internal vowel. 

These verbs are a still less numerous class than the former ; 
and they do not admit of addition to their numbers any 
more than the strong verbs. They would seem to have been 
mostly the growth of a limited period ; that, namely, wherein 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 249 

the transition of habit was taking place from the strong to 
the weak methods of conjugation. 

But, insignificant as this class is in point of numbers, it 
contains within it a small batch of verbs of very high im- 
portance. These are the symbolics of the class. They are 
the verbs commonly called ' auxiliaries,' and they hold (for the 
most part) the same place in the German and other branches 
of our family, as they do in our own English language. 



shall 
can 
will 


should 
could 
would 


may- 
dare 

mote 


might 
durst 

moste, must 



Ought is a preterite which has no present. Indeed, it is 
a preterite only in form and historical development, for it is 
a present in its usage as an auxiliary. ' I ought to do so ' 
signifies that I am in duty bound to do so. The present owe 
has not accompanied the preterite in its transition to this 
moral and semi-symbolic use. When the old preterite had 
deserted the service of the verb owe in its original sense, that 
verb supplied itself with a new preterite of the modern type, 
owed. The distinction between ougk/, the old preterite, and 
owed, the new preterite, is now quite established, and no con- 
fusion happens. But the reader of our old poets should 
observe that ougkf does duty for both these senses. Here 
we have it in Spenser, in a place where the modern usage 
would require owed: — 

'Now were they liegmen to this Ladie free, 
And her knights service ought, to hold of her in fee.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. i. 44. 

These verbs, it will be seen, are destitute of partici- 
ples, and this is merely because they have dropped off 
through disuse. In like manner, and from the same cause, 



2^0 THE VERBAL GROUP, 

few of them have infinitives. Indeed, none of them have 
infinitives of symboHc use. As symbolics, it has been their 
function to serve the participles and infinitives of other verbs, 
and to have none of their own. We can indeed say ' to 
will ' and ' to dare '; but in neither instance would the sense 
or the tone of the word be the same as when we say, ' it will 
rain,' or ' I dare say.' 

So completely has the sense of ' dare-ing ' evaporated from 
this latter auxiliary, that ' I dare say ' is a different thing 
from 'I dare to say.' The latter might be negatived by 
' I dare not to say ' ; but ' I dare not say ' would not be the 
just negative of ' I dare say.' In that expression, the verb 
' dare ' has lost its own colour, and it is infused into ' say.' 
And therefore they often merge by symphytism into one 
word, as in the following, from a newspaper report of a 
pubHc speech : — 

' I daresay you have heard of the sportsman who taught himself to shoot 
steadily by loading for a whole season with blank cartridge only.' 

These verbs are all called by the common title of aux- 
iliaries ; yet there is a gradation of quality in them, which is 
to be measured by their relative retention of presentive 
power. Will has still a good deal. Wilt thou have &c. ? 
/ will ! This word is therefore far less purely a symbol 
than shall, of which the infinitive to shall was never heard in 
our language. In the transition period, we find the verb 
shall serving as an auxiliary to the infinitive verb will. 
In Roberd of Brunne's Handlyng Synne (written a.d. 1303)5 
we have — 

' Y beleue hyt nou3t, ne never shall weyl.* 
7 believe it nought, nor never shall will. 

Ed. Furnivall, for Roxburghe Club, 1. 372. 

This verb in its presentive sense retains, or did retain for 
a long time, one old flexional form, which is never found in 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 2^ 

the symbolic sense. This is willeth. ' God willeth Samuel 
to yield unto the importunity of the people/ — i Samuel viii, 
Contents. ' It is not of him that willeth/ — Rom. ix. i6. 

May has long been without an infinitive, but there was 
one as late as the sixteenth century in the form mowe. 
Thus in the Secret Instructions from Henry VII respecting 
the young Queen of Naples, we read, — 

' And to knowe the specialties of the title and value therof in every behalf 
as nere as they shall mowe.' — National Manuscripts, Part I. 20 Hen. VII. 

Can originally meant to know, and in this presentive sense 
of it, we meet with an infinitive to co7t as late as the fifteenth 
century. 

' To mine well-beloved son, I greet you well, and advise you to think once 
of the day of your father's counsel to learn the law, for he said many times 
that whosoever should dwell at Paston, should have need to con \i.e. know 
how to'\ defend himself.' — Paston Letters, Letter x. a.d. 1444-5. 

The French equivalent for this con would be savoir, and 
in fact the English auxiliary can, could, is largely an imitation 
of that French verb. 

Some auxiliaries have become obsolete. Such is mote the 
present, of which must is the preterite. It lingered till recent 
times as a formula of wishing well or ill, and indeed an 
example of present use has been given above, at p. 174, 
note. Its place has now been taken by 7?iay. 

In a ballad on the Battle of Flodden Field, a.d. 15 13 
{Gentlematis Magazine, August, 1866), this benison is be- 
stowed on the Earl of Surrey : — 

' In the myddyll warde was the Erie of Surrey, 
Ever more blessyd mote thowe be ; 
The ffadyr of witte, well call him we may; 
The debite [deputy] most trusty of Englond was he.' 

A still older auxiliary which is quite extinct is gan, which 
was used as now we use did, and was probably extinguished 



2^2 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

by the preference for the latter. This auxiliary must not be 
too closely associated with the more famiHar word 5egan. 
This latter is a compound of the word, but the sense of 
commencing is the property not of the root so much as of the 
compound. 

' Of a wryght I wylle you telle 
That some tyme in thys land gan dwelle.' 

The Wryght' s Chaste Wife (a.d. 1460). 

Let in early times signified the causation of some action. 
Thus it is said of William the Conqueror by the vernacular 
historian that he ' let speer out ' all the property of the 
country so narrowly that there was never a rood of land 
or a cow or a pig that was not entered in his book — ' swa 
swy^e nearwelice he hit lett ut aspyrian/ &c. {Two Saxon 
Chronicles Parallel, p. 2 1 8.) This ' let ' is a very different 
thing from the light symbol now in use, as when one says 
to a friend, ' Will you let your servant bring my horse ? ' 
To this levity of symbolism it had already arrived in the 
Elizabethan era. 

'Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish minde ; 
But let us hence depart whilest wether serves and winde/ 

The Faerie Queene, Bk. ii., end. 

There is one verb of a character so mixed, that it is for 
distinction sake reserved to a place at the end of this section 
of mixed verbs. It is the verb which, though common to 
German and the other dialects, is yet in one sense peculiar 
to English, namely as an auxiliary. Speaking generally, 
we share our auxiliaries with the rest of the Gothic family, 
but there is one all our own. It is — 

do did done 

The anomaly of its form has been touched on at the close 
of the former section. 

The preterite possesses the double character of a presentive 



THE VERBAL GROUP. iJ53 

and a symbolic word : whereas the participle is never used 
but presentively. So that, although it possesses a participle, 
it differs not from the habit of the other auxiliaries, which 
(as auxiUaries) are destitute of the participle. 

This auxiliary has acquired its peculiar place in our lan- 
guage through our imitation of the French auxihary/^zr^. 

The power of expression which our language possesses 
by means of the auxiliaries has sometimes been under- 
valued. The great proportion of attention which men of 
learning have devoted to the inflected languages, has pre- 
vented our own verbal system from receiving the appre- 
ciation which is due to it. The following quotation from 
Southey may not unfitly close this section. 

' I had spoken as it were abstractedly, and the look which accompanied 
the words was rather cogitative than regardant. The Bhow Begum laid 
down her snufF-box and replied, entering into the feeling, as well as echoing 
the words, " It ought to be written in a book, — certainly it ought," 

' They may talk as they will of the dead languages. Our auxiliary verbs 
give us a power which the ancients, with all their varieties of mood, and 
inflections of tense, never could attain. " It must be written in a book," 
said I, encouraged by her manner. The mood was the same, the tense was 
the same; but the gradation of meaning was marked in a way which a 
Greek or Latin grammarian might have envied as well as admired.' — The 
Doctor, c. vii. A. i. 



III. Weak Verbs. 

The third class of verbs are those which form both their 
preterite and their participle by the addition of -ed as, / kope^ 
I hoped, I have hoped. In some verbs it takes the form of 
changing d into T, as send, sent ; wend, went ; bend, bent. 
But here we must consider the nt as a commutation for 
NDED, or, as it was written in early times, nde. The preterite 
of the Saxon sendan was (not sendade but) sende. This con- 
densed formation takes place not only with verbs in -nd but 
also with those in -ld and -rd. 



a54 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 



Other modes of condensation are used, as made, short for 
maked, Saxon macode. 

These succinct forms of the weak verb must not lead to 
a confusion with either of the foregoing classes. Most of 
them are contained in the following list : — 



PRESENT. 


PRETERITE. 


PARTICIPL 


bend 


bent* 


bent 


bleed 


bled 


bled 


breed 


bred 


bred 


build 


built * 


built 


clothe 


clad* 


clad 


feed 


fed 


fed 


gild 


gilt* 


gilt 


gird 


girt* 


girt 


have 


had 


had 


lay 


laid 


laid 


lead 


led 


led 


learn 


learnt* 


learnt 


lend 


lent 


lent 


light 


lit 


lit 


make 


made 


made 


pen 


pent 


pent 


rend 


rent 


rent 


send 


sent 


sent 


speed 


sped 


sped 


spend 


spent 


spent 


spill 


spilt 


spilt 


wend 


went* 


went 



Those which are marked with an asterisk have also the 
form in -ed. 

Of the usual form of the weak verb it will not be neces- 
sary to give many examples. They are of the following 
pattern : — 



PRESENT. 

allow 

believe 

change 

defend 

educate 

figure 

germinate 

happen 



PRETERITE and PARTICIPLE. 

allowed 

believed 

changed 

defended 

educated 

figured 

germinated 

happened 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 2^^ 

PRESENT. PRETERITE and PARTICIPLE, . 

injure injured 

joke joked 

kindle kindled 

laugh laughed 

mention mentioned 

oil oiled 

present presented 

question questioned 

revere revered 

succeed succeeded 

tarnish tarnished 

utter uttered 

vacillate vacillated 

wonder wondered 

yield yielded 

To this third class belongs the bulk of English verbs. It 
is regarded as the youngest form of verbal inflection, from the 
relation in which we find it standing towards the two classes 
previously described. It is the only verbal inflection which 
can be properly said to be in a living and active state, 
because it applies to new words, whereas the others cannot 
make new verbs after their own pattern. There is a constant 
tendency of the strong and mixed verbs to fall into the forms 
of the weak. 

Steele, in the Spec/a for, March 5, 17 11, wrote, 'the very 
point I shaked my head at.' Allan Ramsay, who in his 
Gentle Shepherd has preserved some rare strong forms, yet 
gives us also on the other side such forms as choosed and 
putted. In Horace Walpole's Royal and Nolle Authors, we 
find, 'The sovereign meaned Charles, Duke of Somerset.' 
' The patriots meaned to make the king odious.' In Hume, 
History of England'. — 

' Perhaps some secret animosities, naturally to be expected in that situa- 
tion, had creeped in among the great men, and had enabled the king to 
recover his authority.' — ch. xvii. 

But while we consider this to be the most recent of the 
verbal inflections in our language, it is of a very high 



0,^6 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

antiquity nevertheless. It is common to all the dialects of 
our family, and in the oldest records it is already established. 
The I) of the weak conjugation has been traced to the 
verb do, did ; as \i hoped were a condensation of hope-did^. 
After what has been said at the close of each of the previous 
sections, it would seem as if this verb do, did, were about to 
claim a great place as the bridge which unites the three 
sorts of conjugation. Should this theory be confirmed, the 
thread of continuity which unites our verbal system, is dis- 
covered. And if it should after all prove untenable, it will 
not have been (probably) without its use, as temporarily 
representing the kind of link which philology teaches us to 
look for between the various formations of which language 
is composed, 

IV. Verb-making. 

It has been shewn at p. i8i, that the English language 
can turn a noun or other suitable word into a verb, and use 
it as a verb, without any alteration to the form of the word, 
such as would be caused by the addition of a verbal forma- 
tive. This does not hinder, however, but that there always 
have been verbal formatives in the language, and that the 
number and variety of these is from time to time increased. 
By verbal formative is meant any addition to a word, whether 
prefix or suffix, which stamps that word as a verb independ- 
ently of a context. 

Such is the suffix -en, by means of which, from the sub- 
stantives height, haste, length, strength, are formed the verbs 
heighten, hasten, leng theft, strengthen. From the adjectives 
deep, fast, short, wide, are formed the verbs deepen, fasten, 

^ Science of Language, by Max Miiller, M.A., 1861, p. 219. 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 257 

shorten, widen. Other examples of this formative, are : 
slacken, lighten, frighten., ?nadden, broaden (Tennyson), harden, 
christen, glisten. This verbal formative n is of Saxon 
antiquity; but it is quite separate and distinct from the 
Saxon infinitive form -an. 

Such again is the prefix be-, by means of which, from the 
substantives head, friend, tide, are formed the verbs behead, 
befriend, betide. 

This formative is still in operation, but is less active than 
it formerly was. It enters into sixty-seven diff"erent verbs in 
Shakspeare, as appears in Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Complete 
Concorda?ice. They are the following : — 

bechance, become, befal, befit, befriend, beget, begin, begnaw, begrime, 
beguile, behave, behead, behold, behove, behowl, belie, believe, belong, be- 
love ('more beloving than beloved,' A7it. and Cleop. i. 2), bemad, beviete, 
bemoan, bemock, bemoil, bepaint, bequeath, berattle, bereave, berhyme, be- 
seech, beseek, beseem, beset, beshrew, besiege, beslubber, besmear, besmirch, 
besort, besot, bespeak, bespice, bestain, bested, bestill, bestir, bestow, be- 
straught, bestrew, bestride, betake, beteem, bethink, bethump, betide, betokeji, 
hetoss, betray, betrim, betroth, bewail, beware, beweep, bewet, bewitch, 
bewray. 

Such again is the prefix un-, by means of which other 
words are made besides verbs, as the substantives and ad- 
jectives unbeliever, unjust, unmeet, &c. ; yet it is also a verbal 
formative because it forms verbs which even without a con- 
text cannot be regarded as being anything else than verbs. 
Examples : — unfrock, untie, unlink, unlock. 

The above examples of verbal formatives are all genuine 
natives : the next is after a French model. The suffix fy is 
taken from those French verbs which end in -fier, after Latin 
verbs ending in facere. Examples : — beatify, beautify, codify, 
deify, dignify, dulcify, edify, electrify, horrify, modify, mollify, 
mortify, nullify, qualify, ratify, satisfy, scarify, stultify, unify. 

' He never condescended to anything like direct flattery; but he felicitously 
hit upon the topic which he knew would tickle the amour propre of those 
wfiom he wished to dulcify.' — Lord Campbell, Life of Lord Lyndhur&t, 1869. 



258 THE VERBAL GROUP. 

The news from Spain in the middle of April, 1869, is 
rendered as follows in the English papers : — 

' It is said that Senor Figuerola, the Minister of Finance, proposes to unify 
the public debt by allowing the next half-yearly interest, due in June, to 
accumulate and be added to the capital.' 

The verbal formative -ate is from the Latin participle pas- 
sive of the first conjugation : as amatus, loved ; aesiimatusj 
valued. Examples : — calculate, captivate, decimate, eradicate, 
estimate, exculpate, expostulate, indicate, invalidate, liquidate, 
mitigate, nominate, ope7' ate, postulate, venerate. 

The, above formatives are of great standing in the lan- 
guage ; but that which we have now to mention, the formative 
-ize, is comparatively modern. It occurs in Shakspeare, as 
tyrannize in King John, v. 7 . 47; partialize in King Rich- 
ard II, i. I. 120; 77ionarchize, Id, iii. 2. 165, but was not in 
general use until the time of the living generation. This is 
a formative which we have copied from the Greek verbs 
ending in -l^^iv. Examples : — advertize, anathematize, ana- 
tomize, cauterize, christianize, deodorize, evangelize, frater7iize, 
generalize, mesmerize, mo7topolize, patronize, philosophize, solilo- 
quize, subsidize, symiholize , sy77ipathize , systematize, utilize. 

These verbs have been multiplied indefinitely in our day, 
partly in consequence of their utility for scientific expression, 
and partly from the fact that about twenty years ago it 
became a toy of University-men to make verbs in -ize about 
all manner of things. A walk for the sake of bodily exercise 
having been called ' a constitutional,' the verb co7istitutio7i- 
alize was soon formed thereupon. It was then caught up in 
country homes, and young ladies who helped the parson in 
any way were said to parochialize. A. H. Clough, when 
engaged on his edition of Plutarch's Lives in English, used 
to report progress to his correspondents by saying that 
he devoted so much of his time to Plutarchizing. % 



THE VERBAL GROUP. 2^g 

Mr. Liddon has adopted transcendentalize : — 

' It has been suggested that the Apostles confused the spiritual Resurrection 
of an idea with the bodily Resurrection of its Author. But a confusion of 
thought which may seem natural to the transcendentalized brain of a modern, 
would never have occurred in that of a Jew nineteen centuries ago, for the 
simple reason that its very materials did not exist.' — The Power of Christ's 
Restirrection, St. Paul's, Easter Day, 1869. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a recent paper, endeavouring to 
distinguish the local elements in the writings of St. Paul from 
that which is essential and permanent, has found it expedient 
to fashion or adapt to his purpose three verbs, and they are 
all of this type, — Hebraize, Orientalize, Judaize. 

A large number of these verbs are more commonly writ- 
ten with -ise than with -ize. That is to say, we are met 
here, as in so many other passages of our language, with that 
quiet unnoticed French influence. Here it will probably 
prove stronger than Greek, as in numerous cases it has 
modified the Latin forms. 

This form is here regarded as Greek, in compliance with 
the view that has been established and consciously acted 
upon for a long time past. But though it has now acquired 
a right to be called a Greek form, it does not follow that the 
first suggestion of it was due to the Greek language. On 
the contrary, reason will be given in the next chapter for 
supposing that it had its beginning in the verbification of 
a French substantive. 

The English verbs present so great a variety of age and 
featuring, that they may as a whole be compared to a vene- 
rable pile of buildings, which have grown by successive 
additions through a series of centuries. One spirit and pur- 
pose threads the whole, and gives a sort of unity in the midst 
of the more striking diversity. The later additions are crude 
and harsh as compared with the more ancient — a fact which 
is partly due to the mellowing effect of age, and partly also 
s 2 



26o THE VERBAL GROUP. 

to the admission of strange models. In our speech, as well 
as in our architecture, we are now sated with the classic 
element, and we are turning our eyes back with curiosity 
and interest to what was in use before the revival of letters, 
and before the renaissance of classic art. 

Except that the verbs require not their hundreds, but 
their thousands of years, to be told off when we take count of 
their development, we might offer this as a fitting similitude. 
They are indeed variously featured, and bearing the cha- 
racters of widely differing ages, and they are united only in 
a oneness of purpose ; and by reason of these characters I 
have used the collective expression which is at the head of 
this chapter, and designated them as The Verbal Group. 



CHAPTER VIL 



THE NOUN-GROUP. 

We are now come to the backbone of our subject. The 
relation of the verb to the noun may be figured not unaptly 
by calling the verb the head-piece, and the noun the back- 
bone. 

When we say the noun, we mean a group of words which 
comprise no less than the whole essential presentives of the 
language. In grammars these are ordinarily divided into 
three groups, the substantive, the adjective, and the adverb. 
We call these the presentives, and they will be found pre- 
cisely co-extensive with that term. It is true that many 
verbs are presentive, and this may seem a difficulty. More 
verbs are presentive than are not. But it is no part of the 
quality of a verb to be presentive ; if it is presentive, that 
circumstance is a mere accident of its condition. But all 
which we shall include in the noun-group are essentially 
presentive, and they constitute the store of presentive words 
of the language. When verbs are presentive, they are so 
precisely in proportion to the amount of nounal stuff that is 
mixed up in their constitution. 

To know a verb from a noun is perhaps the most ele- 
mentary step in the elements of grammar. We assume that 



262 THE NOUN-GROVP, 

the reader has not only mastered this distinction, but that he 
has so thoroughly accreted it and assimilated it to his habits 
of mind, that it will not be liable to dislodgement under the 
rude shock which philology must inflict upon partial con- 
ceptions. Not that there is anything wrong in this gram- 
matical distinction, or anything that has to be unlearnt. The 
distinction itself is good as a practical statement. But in 
philology we seek an explanation of these relations in their 
nature and origin. And, philologically speaking, the presentive 
verb is only a noun raised to a verbal power. As a ready 
illustration of this, we may easily form an alphabetical list of 
words which are nouns if they have a or an, and verbs if 
they have fo prefixed : ape, bat, cap, dart, eye, fight, garden, 
house, ink, knight, land, mark, number, order, pair, question, 
range, sail, time, usher, vaunt, wing, yell. 

As soon indeed as you put to any one of these the sign of 
a noun or of a verb, a great difference ensues — a dif- 
ference hardly less than that between the gunpowder to 
which you have put the match and that over which you have 
snapped the pouch's mouth. Little by little, external marks 
of distinction gather around that word which the mind has 
promoted to the highest order. Pronunciation first, and 
orthography at a slower distance, seek gradually to give 
a form to that which a flash of thought has instantaneously 
created. Pronunciation takes advantage of its few op- 
portunities, while orthography contends with its many 
obstacles. We make a distinction in pronunciation between 
a house and to house, between a use and to use between a 
record and to record. But these distinctions of sound are 
as yet unwritten. In other cases orthography has added its 
mark of distinction also. We distinguish both by sound and 
writing a gap from to gape, an advice from to advise, and a 
prophecy from to prophesy. 



THE NOUN-GROUP. 263 

This is perhaps as much as need here be said to account 
for the wide separation now existing between nouns and 
verbs, though they are one at the root. The difference of 
condition that now severs them as by a gulf is the accumu- 
lated result of the age-long continuation of that process 
whose beginnings are here indicated. 

So much is here said of the relation of the verb to the 
noun, merely in order to justify the statement that the pre- 
sent chapter is devoted to the presentive words. For we 
must regard the verbs — always excepting the symboHc 
verbs ; that is, verbs which in whole or in part have shed 
their old nounal coat — simply as nouns raised to an official 
position in the mechanism of the sentence, and qualified for 
their office by receiving a predicative power. 

As the verb is most retentive of antiquity, and as it there- 
fore offers the best point of comparison with other languages 
of the same Gothic stock, so, on the side of the noun 
we may say that it exhibits best the stratification of the 
language. By which is meant, that the traces of the suc- 
cessive influences which have passed over the national mind 
have left on the noun a continuous series of deposits, and 
that it is here we can most plainly read off the history and 
experiences of the individual language. The verb will tell 
us more of comparative philology; but the noun will tell 
more of the particular philology of the English language. 

And here we enter on a chapter which will peculiarly 
need the relief afforded by illustrative quotations. It may 
therefore be expedient to come to an understanding upon 
the object and aim of our quotations. 

Our present pursuit is not Grammar, nor Rhetoric, nor 
Belles Lettres. We are not concerned with taste, correct- 
ness, or conventional propriety. We neither commend any 
expression nor dissuade from the use of it. Our examples and 



364 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

illustrations are not presented to the reader to stimulate him 
to imitation ; but merely in attestation of the hold which the 
form under consideration has upon the writers of the lan- 
guage. We simply endeavour to arrange in a consecutive 
and proportionate order the phenomena of the language. 
All that belongs to the domain of taste, or fancy, or fashion, 
we leave to be dealt with by the proper authorities in those 
departments. 

Our first object in quotation is to illustrate th.eyor?n. And 
the/orm can often be exhibited to advantage in words of 
a strange and novel character, rather than in those well- 
established words which are so familiar to the eye, that they 
waken no feeling of analytical enquiry. Something may 
indeed here be learnt of the commendable use of the 
word. But this is a secondary and incidental advantage, 
and one which is available for that reader only who can judge 
for himself how far each expression is worthy of imitation. 

The second and more general object in quotation is 
to show the word in context. And for this reason : — 
Words out of context are not seen in their true light, 
because they are not seen in their natural element. The 
context is to a word what water is to a fish. It is only in 
its native element that it exhibits its native character. It 
should be remembered that words have not been invented 
and moulded by themselves, and then afterwards put to- 
gether into sentences. The ordinary course of grammar is 
perhaps a litde apt to betray the mind into an unconscious 
habit of thinking somewhat as if this were the case. But the 
forms which are the terminations of most substantives have 
that sort of natural relation to a context which the delicate 
spongioles at the tips of root-fibres have to the ingredients 
of the soil in which they have been generated, and on which 
they are still dependent for their life and usefulness. 



SUBSTANTIVES. 26^ 

The words inwardness and everlasHngness would excite 
little admiration standing by themselves ; perhaps they might 
hardly be credited with a right to be entitled words at all. 
But look at the quotations in which these words occur 
below among the substantives in -ness, and you will accord 
to them at least credit, if not admiration. 

Under the title then of the Noun-Group three parts of 
speech are included — the Substantive, the Adjective, and the 
Adverb. For all these are in fact nouns under different 
aspects. 

This chapter will consist of three sections corresponding 
to these three parts of speech. 



I. Of the Substantive. 

The chief forms are the Saxon, the French, the Latin, and 
the Greek forms. The Saxon are generally to be found 
extant in one or more of the cognate dialects, such as the 
Icelandic, the Dutch, the German, the Danish, the Swedish. 
But substantives will not be found to unite all the languages 
in one consent so often as the strong verbs. 

The oldest group consists of those short words which 
have no distinguishable suffix or formative attached to them, 
or whose formative is now obscured by deformation. The 
bulk of this class is monosyllabic, not always by origin, but 
often by condensation. Thus, for example, the words 
hrain, brawn, king, sail, tile, stairs, snail, are disyllabic in 
Saxon, viz. brcegen, cyning, segel, tigel, stcsger, snegel. So of 
many others which are now monosyllables. 

The following w^ords are mostly found in the cognate 
dialects. 



0^66 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Examples : — arm, ash, awe, awl, badge, beam, bear, bed, bee, 
bier, bliss, boat, borough, bread, breast, bride, buck, calf, chin, 
cloth, corn, cow, craft, day, deal, deed, deer, doom, door, down 
(on a peach), drink, drone, ear, earth, east, edge, elm, eye, fat 
( = vessel), field, fish, flesh, flood, fly, fold, foot, frog, frost, 
furze, ghost, goat, goose, glass, gnat, ground, guest, handt., head, ' 
heap, heart, hill, hood, hoof, horse, hound, house, ice, ivy, keel, 
king, knave, knee, knight, knot, lamb, land, laugh, leaf Lent, 
lore, louse, lust, 7nan, mark, meed, mist, moon, mouse, mouth, 
nest, 7iet, north, nose, oak, oath, ox, path, pith, rake, ram, rest, 
rick, ri7id, ring, roof, rope, salve, sap, sea, seal (phoca), seed, 
share, sheaf, sheep, shield, ship, shoe, sin, smith, son, song, 
sough, south, speed, stafl^, stall, star, steer, stone, stow, stream, 
sun, swine, tear, thief tide, tongue, tooth, tree, wain, way, west, 
wether, whale, wheel, whelp, wife, wind, wold, wolf, womb, 
wood, world, worm, yard, year , yoke. 

These we may regard as simple words, that is to say, 
words in which we cannot see more than one element 
unless we mount higher than the biet of the present treatise. 
From these we pass on to others in which we begin to 
recognise the traces of nounal formatives, that is, of termina- 
tions as distinct from the body of the words. 

Forms in -l : — churl, earl, evil, fowl, nail, settle (a bench), 
sail, snail, soul, shovel, spittle, tile. 

Bubble is an instance in which this formative seems to 
have a diminutive sense. See Richardson, v. Bub. Car- 
penters in Somersetshire call their plummet a plumb-bob. 
Halliwell, v. Bob, quotes the following from manuscript, 
where bobs are bunches : — 

' They saw also thare vynes growe with wondere grete bobbis of grapes, 
for a mane my3te unnethez here ane of thame.' 

Thimble is from thumb with a thinning of the internal 
vowel. 



I 



SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON. 26 "J 

Forms in -m: — hosovi, fathom, helm, seam. 

Forms in -n : — beacon, burden, chicken, heaven, maiden, main 
(A. S. maegen = strength), rain, raven, steven (Chaucer), thane 
(A.S. ]7egen), token, weapon, welkin. 

Forms in r : — acre (A. S. secer), brother, cock-chafer, daugh- 
ter, father, feather, finger, leather, liver, mother, sister, stair ^ 
summer, thunder, timber, water, winter, wonder. 

Forms inT: — bight, blight, fight, height, might, sight. 

' Cross-examination resumed. — " I got the bight of the handkerchief 
behind the boy's head, and laid hold of the two corners of it. All this time 
prisoner was trying, as well as I, to get the boy in. I was lying down^ and 
so was prisoner, reaching across the water."' 

The above are from well-known roots ; but there are others 
of more obscure origin which bear a resemblance to the 
above, as light, right, wight. 

Forms in th : — as breadth, length, strength, width. 

Here also belongs math in Tennyson's ' after-math,' from 
the verb to 7now. 

Faith is one of these, which was formed upon the French 
foi, anglicised/^. These two words went on for a long 
time together, with a tolerably clear distinction of sense. 
Fey meant religious belief, creed, as in the exclamation By 
my fey ! while/azV/^ signified the moral virtue of loyalty or 
fidelity. 

In -ing : as king (A. S. cyning), and those which in Saxon 
end in -ung, as blessing. In this form the noun comes into 
its closest contact with the verb. Into this group merged 
the old Saxon infinitive in -an, as we shall show in the Syn- 
tax. In the old language the noun and the substantive were 
well distinguished by the diff"erence of form, but in modern 
English it is often so hard to say whether a word in -ing is a 
noun or a verb, that the decision must be merely arbitrary. 
Here it will be enough just to give a quotation to illustrate 



2,6S THE NOUN-GROUP. 

this peculiar substantival usage of the verb, and verbal use 
of the substantive. 

In the ' Glosse ' to the Shepheards Calender for the month 
of April, the word making offers an example in which this 
noun-form is identified with the infinitive verb. 

' To make, to rime and versifye. For in this word, making, our olde 
Englishe Poetes were wont to comprehend all the skil of Poetrye, according 
to the Greeke woorde iroieTv to make, whence commeth the name of Poetes.' 



•In a moment, in the twykelynge of an yje.' — Wiclif, i Cor. xv. 52. 

The old Saxon title yE^eh'ng for the Crown Prince, must 
find its place here. About the year 1 300, Robert of Glou- 
cester considered this word as needing an explanation : — 

' Ac Jie gode tryw men of J>e lond wolde abbe ymade kyng 
pe kunde eyr, ])e 3onge chyld, Edgar A]?elyng. 
Wo so were next kyng by kunde, me clupe)) hym AJ^elyng. 
pervor me clupede hym so, vor by kunde he was next kyng.' 

Ed. Hearne, i. 354. 

Translation. — Btit the good true men of the land wotdd have made ling 
the natural heir, the yotmg Chyld, Edgar Atheling. PT-^oso were next kifig 
by birthright, men call him Atheling : therefore men called him so, for by 
birth he was next Mng. 

In -ere, as bcecere, baker ; and boceras, for the ' scribes ' 
in the Gospels, literally bookers. From this source we have 
also Conner (as in ' ale-conner '), dealer, ditcher, fiddler, fisher, 
fowler, grinder, harper, listener, -monger, skipper, Webber. 

Thus in Matthew xiii. 45, 'Eft ys heofena rice gelic ))am 
mangere,' &c., which WicHf rendered by a man marchaunt, 
and the Bible of 1 6 1 1 by « mar chant man. 

These terminations are of very high antiquity, and we 
can give no account of them as separate and independent 
words. It is otherwise with those other old formatives, 
-ness, -dom, -hood, -lock, -rick, -red, -ship. We know the 



SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON. 26g 

meaning which each of them had in its separate state, 
prior to its becoming a formative. 

-ness meant a projection, promontory, point of termina- 
tion, headland. Thus in Beowtd/ 444, the forelands at sea 
are called s(X-ncBssas, or sea-nesses ; and many a headland 
on our coast has still Ness attached to it, or some variety of 
that word: e.g. Denge Ness (Kent), Caithness (Scotland), 
Foulness (Essex); Furness (Lancashire); The Naze (Essex); 
Nash Point (Glamorganshire). 

It is hardly possible to imagine a bolder figure, or one 
more apt to convey the idea of abstraction, than that which 
presents the concrete as elongated to a tapering point. 

Examples: — composedness, goodness, heaviness, indebtedness, 
meanness, readiness, suppleness, usefulness, weariness, wilder- 
ness, &c. 

Illustrations : — 

new-fangleness. 

' Innovations and new-fangleness.' — Preface to Book of Common Prayer. 

charitableness, contentedness, peaceableness. 
' Charitableness, peaceableness, and contentedness.' — Proverbs iii, Contents. 

highmindedness, dejectedness. 

' He that cannot abound without pride and highmindedness, will not want 
without too much dejectedness Frame a sufficiency out of con- 
tentedness.' — Richard Sibbes, Soul's Conflict, ch. x. 

composedness. 

'Spiritual composedness and sabbath of spirit.' — Id." 

everlastingness. 

' But felt through all this fleshly dress. 
Bright shoots of everlastingness.' 

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), The Retreat. 

darknesses. 
' Glorious in His darknesses.' — Jeremy Taylor, Life of Christ, vol. ii. p. 59. 
Heber's ed. 



2/0 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

There has been a period since the seventeenth century. in 
which this formative has been less in vogue, whilst the Latin 
-ah'on has prevailed ; but of late years it has been much 
revived, and has supplied some new words, as indebtedness. 
Indeed, the form has become a marked favourite, and new 
turns of speech are readily formed by help of it. In the bold 
novelty of some of them we may almost trace a spirit of 
rebellion against conventionality. 

northness. 

' Long lines of cackling geese were sailing far overhead, winging their way 
to some more remote point of northness.' — Dr. Hayes, Open Polar Sea, 
ch. XXXV. 

??iisswnariness. 

' It is, I think, alarming — peculiarly at this time, when the female ink- 
bottles are perpetually impressing upon us woman's particular worth and 
general missionariness — to see that the dress of women is daily more and 
more unfitting them for any mission or usefulness at all.' — Florence Night- 
ingale, Notes on Niirsing. 

naturalness. 

' The unaffected country naturalness of the lad,' — Doctor Johns, by I. K. 
Marvel, 1866. 

hopefulness, helieffulness, 

' And there is a hopefulness and a beliefFulness, so to say, on your side, 
which is a great compensation,' — A. H. Clough to R. W. Emerson, 1853. 

sure-footedness. 

' And if the Testament of Love is not in at least some parts a translation 
or paraphrase, Chaucer was not only a poet but a metaphysician. Otherwise 
no acquaintance with the philosophy of his time would have carried him 
safely over the sensitive ground which he sometimes touches with logical 
sure-footedness in that remarkable book.' — Chaucer's Etiglatid, by Matthew 
Browne, vol. i. p. 7. 

inwardness. 

'Nor Nature fails my walks to bless 
With all her golden inwardness.' 

James Russell Lowell. 



5* UBSTANTIVES — SAXON. ^7 1 

non-namekssness. 

' We may in this respect afBrm that the non-namelessness of the historian 
is the beginning of historical science.' — History of Israel, by Heinrich Ewald, 
ed. Martineau, vol. i, p. 57. 

The philological value of such examples must not be 
measured by our admiration of them. We may safely 
assume that these words were viewed with complacency by 
their authors. And they therefore aiford an indirect testi- 
mony to the prominence which is now given to the formative 
-ness as a binding and consoHdating agent. If the evidence 
is exaggerated, it is not on that account to be rejected as 
worthless. Attempts of this magnitude are not made in the 
strength of -red, -lock, nor even of -hood or -ship. 

This termination is now frequently substituted for French 
or Latin terminations of like significance, and this even 
in words of Romanesque material. A lady asked me why 
the author wrote effeminaieness and not effeminacy in the 
following passage. 

' 1812, June 17th. At four o'clock dined in the Hall with De Quincey, 
who was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage in 
Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His person 
is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are those of a sickly 
and enfeebled man. From this circumstance his sensibility, which I have 
no doubt is genuine, is in danger of being mistaken for efFeminateness.' — 
Diary, &c., 0/ Henry Crabb Robinson, vol. i. p. 391. 

Indeed, -cy and -ness are good equivalents, and hence 
they are often seen coupled or opposed, as decency and 
cleanliness. 

' Decency must have been difficult in such a place, and cleanliness im- 
possible.' — James Anthony Froude, History of England, August, 1 567. 

The collective or abstract -dom is a form of high an- 
tiquity, being found in all the dialects except the Moeso- 
Gothic. It seems to have originally meant distinction, 
dignity, grandeur, and so to have been chosen to express 



272 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

the great whole of anything. As a separate word it became 
doom, meaning authority and judgment. 

Examples : — Christendom, heathendovi, kingdom, martyrdom, 
serfdom, Shirifdome (Camden's Britannia, ed. 1607, p. 698), 
thraldom, wisdom. Altered form : — halidam. 

The Germans make a variety of nouns with this formative, 
as 93ift§um = bishopdom, Oteic^t^um = richdom. 

This form has recovered a new activity of late years, and 
it is now highly prolific. Thus we read of scoundreldom 
and rascaldom. 

' High-born scoundreldom.' — J. A. Froude, at St. Andrew's, March, 1869. 

' I doubt very much indeed whether the honesty of the country has been 
improved by the substitution so generally of mental education for industrial ; 
and the " three R's," if no industrial training has gone along with them, are 
apt, as Miss Nightingale observes, to produce a fourth ' R ' — of rascaldom.' 
—Id. ibid. 

The value of the formative has much altered in the case 
of Christendom. This word is now used to signify the 
geographical area which is peopled by Christians ; but in 
the early use it meant just what we now mean by Chris- 
tianity, the profession and condition of Christianity. William 
de Shoreham's poem De Baptismo opens thus : 

' Cristendom his that sacrement 
That men her ferst fongeth.' 

Morris, Specimens, p. 121. 

Nouns in -red are, and always w^re, but few^ The forma- 
tive answers to the German rati) in ^eirat^, marriage, 
originally meaning design, but in the formative having only 
the sense of condition. It seems to be the same as the 
final syllable in the proper names jEl/red, Eadred, J^pelred. 
Of this formation I can only produce two words that are 
still in current use. 

Examples : — kindred, hatred. 



SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON. ^^73 

In Longman's Edward the Third, vol. ii. p. 15, we have 
mention of a fourteenth-century form — 

gossip-red. 

' But the enmity between the " English by blood " and " English by birth " 
still went on, and the former married with the Irish, adopted their language, 
laws, and dress, and became bound to them also by " gossipred " and 
" fosterage." ' 

The words of this formation seem to be specially adapted 
for the expression of human relationships, whether natural, 
moral, or social. This is the case with the three already 
instanced, as well as with others belonging to the Saxon 
stage of the language. We must not omit the word neigh- 
bourhood, which is one of these terms of social relation- 
ship, and which was originally ' neighbourr^^,' as we find it 
far into the transition period. Thus in the Old English 
Homilies, ed. Morris (Early English Text Society), p. 137. 

' Mon sul'Se his elmesse ])enne he heo gefe^ swulche monne 'Se he for 
scome wernen ne mei for ne^eburreddej 

' Man sells his alms when he giveth it to such a man as he for very shame 
cannot warn off [ = decline giving to] by reason of the ties of neighbour- 
hood.' 

-lock, -ledge. These are very few now, and were not 
numerous in Saxon, where the termination was in the form 
-lac : as, brydlac, marriage ; gu^lac, battle ; reaflac, spoil ; 
scinlac, sorcery, &c. The word lac here is an old word 
for play, and still exists locally in the term lake-fellow for 
playfellow. To lake is common in Cumberland and West- 
moreland in the sense of ' to play.' It is not generally known, 
I believe, — it certainly was not known to me until I learnt 
it by a friendly annotation on this sheet, — that when tourists 
to the Lakes are called lakers, the natives imply the double 
meaning of Lake-admirers and idlers. 

Examples: — charlock, wedlock; and in an altered form, 
k7iowledge. 



274 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Guthlac was not only a word for battle, but was also a 
man's name, to wit, of the Hermit of Croyland. So that 
the personal signification of z£^izr/(?<:/^ does not prevent us from 
regarding it also as one of this class, at least by assimilation. 
It is probably a modification of the Saxon wcer-loga, which 
Grein .eloquently translates veritatis infitiator, and which was 
applicable to almost any sort of intelligent being that was per- 
fidious, and under a ban, and beyond the pale of humanity. 

-hood was an independent substantive in Saxon literature, 
in the form of had. This word signified office, degree, 
faculty, quality. Thus, while the power and jurisdiction of 
a bishop was called ' biscopdom ' and ' biscopric,' the sacred 
function which is bestowed in consecration was called 
hiscophdd. Sax. Chron. (E) 1048. And the verb for or- 
daining or consecrating was one which signified the 
bestowal of had, viz. 'hadian.' 

Examples : — boyhood, brotherhood, childhood, hardihood, like- 
lihood, maidenhood, manhood, sisterhood, zvidowhood. 

An altered form is -head, as in Godhead, an alteration 
which makes it difficult for many to see that it is the ana- 
logue of manhood, and as if God-hood. It is sometimes 
written -hed, as lustihed, maidenhed (virginitas), sainthed. 
This is Spenser's form, with the single or double d, -hed 
or -hedd, as in his description of a comet : 

dreryhedd. 

' All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast 
His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispredd, 
At sight whereof the people stand aghast ; 
But the sage wisard telles, as he has redd, 
That it importunes death and dolefull dreryhedd.' 

The Faerie Qiieene, iii. i. 16. 

bountihed. 
' She seemed a woman of great bountihed.' 

Id. iii. I, 41. 



SUBSTANTIVES — SAXON. 275 

The word livelihood merits notice by itself. It has been 
assimilated to this class by the influence of such forms as 
likelihood. The original Saxon word was lif-ladu (vitae 
cursus), the course or leading of Hfe. In the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries it was written liflode, and was the 
commonest word for ' living ' in the sense of means of life, 
where we now have the (unhistorical) form livelihood. 

This formative is represented in German by -^i\.i, as 
ect)t, genuine; @c^tl)eit, genuineness. 

-ship is from the old verb scapan to shape ; and indeed 
it is the mere addition of the general idea of shape on to 
the noun of which it becomes the formative abstract. It 
corresponds to the German -fc^aft, as ©efell, companion ; 
©efellfcf^aft, society. 

Examples : — dodorship^ fellowship, friendship, lordship, 
ladyship, ownerships proctorship, trusteeships workmanship, 
worship ( = worth- ship). 

Illustrations : — 

' The proctorship and the doctorship,' — Clarendon, History, i. § 189. 

' Trusteeship has been converted into ownership,' — Edward Hawkins, D.D., 
Our Debts to CcBsar and to God, 1868. 

In the translation of Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte, 
by S. Winkworth, vol. i. p. 292, there is the form acquaint- 
anceship. 

The Dutch form is -schap, as in Landschap, German ^ant- 
fc^aft — a word which we have borrowed from the Dutch 
artists, and which we retain in the form of landscape. 

The form -ric is an old word for rule, sway, dominion, 
jurisdiction. We have but one word left with this formative, 
viz. bishopric. There used to be others, as cyneric, which 
we now call kingdom, but which the Germans call ^dntgitic^. 
They would not regard the last syllable in this word as a 
T 2 



276 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

formative, but as an independent substantive Qfteid), and they 
would regard .fonigreic^ as a compound. We cannot so 
regard bishopric, simply because we have lost ric as a dis- 
tinct substantive. But when the word bishopric was first 
made, it was made as a compound. 

The same is true of all this group of nouns in -dojji, -ness, 
-had, -red, -ship, that they were originally started as com- 
pounds, but the latter syllable having lost its independent 
hold on the speech, it has come to be regarded as a mere 
formative attached to the body of the word by flexional 
symphytism. 

At the end of the Saxon list it seems most natural to 
mention a few words which make their appearance for the 
first time with the modern English language, and of which 
the origin is obscure. Such are boy, girl, pig, dog. 

The next forms of nouns were those which we obtained 
from the French in the period when our language was still 
in a nascent state. Some of our French nouns are not easy 
to classify. As examples we may name madam, beldame 
(Spenser often), and the word garden (Yrench. jardin) which 
the people all over the country have such an inclination to 
terminate with -ing. In this there may possibly be some 
reminiscence of a French pronunciation. At any rate in 
America (where the rapid disappearance of the uncultivated 
forms of speech is teaching writers to prize them) we have 
good authority for its recognition. 

The second series of Mr. Lowell's Biglow Papers was 
inscribed to Judge Hoar, who is the judge celebrated in the 
following lines : 

* An' I've ben sence a-visitin' the Jedge, 
Whose garding whispers with the river's edge. 
Where I've sat mornin's lazy as the bream 
Whose on'y business is to head-up the stream 



SUBSTANTIVES— FRENCH. 277 

(We call 'em punkin-seed), or else to chat 
Along 'ith the Jedge, who covers with his hat 
More wit, an' gunnption, an' shrewd Yankee sense 
Than is mosses on an ole stone fence.' 

To the above may be added hargctm, truant^ minion^ 
range, issue, and the word aunt, old French aiite (Latin amita),^ 
which they have since altered to tante by prefixing a merely 
euphonic /. 

Not unfrequently the French nouns which came into 
English had been previously borrowed from the Franks, or 
some race of Gothic stock. Thus guardian, which occurs 
in every chief language of Europe, is from an Old High 
Dutch word, which corresponds to the last syllable in the 
Saxon name Edward. In our form warden, we cast off the 
French guise of the first syllable, but retained the Roman- 
esque termination, Latin -ianus, French -ien. 

Among the most thoroughly domesticated of the French 
forms is 

-ry or -ery (French -erii) e.g. cavalry, chapelry, deanery, 
fishery, iinagery, Jewry, mockery, poetry, pottery, poultry, 
rookery, sorcery, spicery, swannery, trumpery (French trom- 
perie), ivitchery. 

Illustrations : — shrubbery is from the old homely word 
scrub in the sense which it bears in ' Wormwood Scrubs,' 
and in the following quotation : 

' It [the barony of Farney] was then a wild and almost unenclosed alder 
plain, and consisted chiefly of coarse pasturage interspersed with low alder 
scrub.' — W. Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life, p. 66. 

fopperies, trumperies. 

' What a world of fopperies there are — of crosses, of candles, of holy water, 
and salt, and censings ! Away with these trumperies.' — Bishop Hall. 

mockeries. 

' I think we are not wholly brain, 
Magnetic mockeries.' — In Memoriam, cxix. 



278 THE NOVN'GROUP. 

This -erie seems to have sprung from a combination of 
the old Latin termination -za with the r or -er of the Latin, 
or rather Roman, infinitive verb. Thus tromperie, from 
tromper, to deceive. The termination -ia being toneless 
in Latin, disappeared in the elder French words, those which 
were in the truest sense of the word Romanesque. Thus, 
as M. Brachet has shewn, the Latin angustia became in 
French angoisse (anguish) ; the Latin invidia became in 
French envie (envy) ; the Latin gratia became in French 
and English, grace. In these, which are the earliest progeny 
of the Latin nouns in -ia, that termination is absorbed into 
the body of the word, and has not retained a separate ex- 
istence. But there were words of later growth — words made 
of barbarian material, but fashioned after the classic pattern 
— in which this -ia was still propagated. Such were many 
mediaeval nouns, as the IjdXinfelonia, French /elonie, English 
felony. This -ia is not unfrequently represented in our 
English terminations in -y. Thus in Burgundia, Burgundy, 
we retain the Latin termination; but in the French form 
Bourgogne it is absorbed. In the case of Britannia we have 
two English forms, the one Britanny, in which the -ia is 
represented, and the other Britain, after the French Bretagne, 
in which it is absorbed. 

This -ia compounded with -er became European in the 
middle ages. To it we may ascribe the geographical terms 
Neustria and Austria. From it the Germans have borrowed 
their =eret, as SutiStcret, jurisprudence. Poetria was a 
mediaeval Latin word which we imitated the French in 
adopting. It has long ago disappeared from French, so 
that poetry is now distinctively an English word. As early as 
161 1, Poeterie is given in Cotgrave as ' an old word.' 

Another distinctive word, but of our own stamping, \^ fairy. 
This was originally the collective noun from the French _/^'^, 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 279 

as those little folk are still called across the Channel, but we 
gradually passed from such expressions as land of faerie and 
queene of faerie, to make fairies the modern substitute for 
the native title of elves. 

Into the groove thus prepared by the French -erie, we 
have received the word psaltery from the Greek -rjpiov. 
(Whether these two are of one source originally it belongs 
not to this place to enquire.) 

' For the elements were changed in themselues by a kind of harmonie , 
like as in a Psaltery notes change the name of the tune, and yet are alwayes 
sounds.' — Wisedom of Solomon, xix. 18. 

Next we will mention the form -son (also -shion and 
-som), which is after the French from the Latin nouns in 
•^Ho, -tionis. The termination -son represents the Latin 
accusative case. Thus the French raison answers to the 
Latin rationem. 

Examples : — advowson (advocationem), arson, henison (be- 
nedictionem), comparison (comparationem), fashion (fac- 
tionem), garrison (Fr. garnison), lesson (lectionem), malison 
(maledictionem), orison {px2X\0Ti^m), poison (potionem), ransom 
(renditionem), reason, season (sationem), treason (traditionem), 
venison (venationem). 

Foison is an interesting word of this class. It is now out 
of use, but it occurs in Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspeare. 
It signified ' abundance,' ' copiousness,' and represented 
fusionem the accusative oi fusio, which was used in a sense 
something like our modern Latin word ' profusion.' The 
modern Italian has the substantive fusione. It is a very 
frequent word in Froissart, as grand' foison de gent, a great 
multitude of people. The following passage, from a fif- 
teenth-century description of the hospitahty of a Vavasour, 
exemplifies the use of this word. 



38o THE NOUN- GROUP. 

' " Sirs," seide the yonge man, "ye be welcome, and ledde hem in to the 
middill of the Court, and thei a-light of theire horse, and ther were I-nowe ' 
that ledde hem to stable, and yaf hem hey and otes, fFor the place was well 
stuffed ; and a squyer hem ledde in to a feire halle be the grounde hem for 
to vn-arme, and the Vavasour and his wif, and his foure sones that he hadde, 
and his tweyne doughtres dide a-rise, and light vp torches and other lightes 
ther-ynne, and sette water to the fier, and waisshed theire visages and theire 
handes, and after hem dried on feire toweiles and white, and than brought 
eche of hem a mantell, and the Vauasour made cover the tables, and sette 
on brede and wyne grete foyson, and venyson and salt flessh grete plente ; 
and the knyghtes sat down and ete and dranke as thei that ther-to haue 
great nede,' &c. — Merlin, Early EngHsh Text Society, p. 517. 

-ment. From the Latin men/um, 2u's, frumentum, jumentum. 
This form has figured much more largely in French than it 
ever has in English. For example, we have not and never 
had in English the two Latin words now quoted. But the 
French have both frovient and jument. They were most 
numerous with us during the period when the French in- 
fluence was most dominant. The following are older than 
Chaucer : — acupement, adubbement, advancement, af ailment, 
amendement, apparaylment, amonestement, arnement, asseyment, 
batelment, cement, chastisement, comandement, compacement, con- 
jurement, coronement, cumberment, deuysement, ditement, element, 
emparement, enchauntement, enprysonmenl, eysement, feffement, 
firmament, foundement, garnement, instrument, juggement, mar- 
tirement, moment, ornemenl, oynement, parlement, pavement, 
payment, pimenl, prechement, sacrament, savement, sentement, 
tabelment, tenement, testament, torment, tornement, vesselment, 
vestement, warentment. An explanation of the more obscure 
of these words may generally be found in the Glossarial 



1 I-nowe = enough. The word is just so pronounced to this day in Devon- 
shire; not however with the eye-sound of I. This prefix represents the 
Saxon ge in gerioh. The odd tendency to make the ge into a capital I is 
not without its importance. By the fidelity of the Early English Text 
Society to these little matters, their publications have a greater philological 
value. For the kind of importance that may attach to this capital I, see the 
case of ' I wis * above, at p. 248. 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 281 

Index to the Printed English Literature of the Thirteenth 
Century, by Herbert Coleridge. 

Examples from Chaucer and later authors : — commaunde- 
ment [Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 33), condiment, detriment, enchant- 
ment (Chaucer), firmament (Spenser), habiliment, instrument 
(Chaucer), judgment, parliament {par lenient in Chaucer), 
regiment. 

Illustrations : — 

hardiment. 
' With stedfast corage and stout hardiment.' 

Faerie Queene, iii. I. 19. 

dreriment. 

' To sorrow huge she turned her former play, 
And gamesome mirth to grievous dreriment.' 

Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 30. 

In the following quotation, intendiment means ' knowledge,' 
from the French entendre, to understand. 

' Into the woods thenceforth in haste shee went, 
To seeke for herbes that mote him remedy ; 
For she^e of herbes had great intendiment.' 

Faerie Queene, iii. 5. 32. 

A great and prominent word of the present day is 
improvement. 

' It is true that much was don# for the place from outside. Much of 
what is called sanitary improvement was accomplished and is still effective. 
But sanitary improvements do not save souls.' — Harry Jones, Life in the 
World, 1865. 

A word which is still more prominent in our times, and 
which may be called one of the words of the period, is 
development. This is a modernism with us, and its use cannot 
be traced back much more than a century, while its celebrity 
is still more recent. It is a French word, and is of con- 
siderable antiquity in that language. The following from 
Randle Cotgrave (161 1) is interesting: — 



283 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

' Desvelope : m. ee : f. Vnwrapped, vnfoulden ; opened, vndone ; displaied, 
spread abroad ; also, cleered. 

Desvelopement : m. An vnwrapping, vn/oulding ; vndoing, opening; 
manifesting, displaying, spreading open. 

Desveloper. To vnwrap, vtifould ; vndoe, open, shew forth, display, 
spread abroad ; rid, vnpester, cleere." 

An apparent but not real member of this group is parch- 
ment, which is from the Latin pergamejia (charta), through 
the French iorm. parche?7iin. 

sentement ( = taste, flavour). 

'And other Trees there ben also, that beren Wyn of noble sentement.'- - 
Maundevile, p. 189. 

firmament^ compassemeni. 

' For the partie of the Firmament schewethe in o contree, that schewethe 
not in another contree. And men may well preven by experience and sotyle 
compassement of Wytt that .... men myghte go be schippe alle aboute 
the world.' — Maundevile, p. 180. 

savement ( = salvation). 

' For Seint James, in hys boke 
Wysseth wyd gode mende 
That 3yf any by-falthe ry3t syke 
The prest he scholde of-sende, 
To hys ende : 
And he schel elye hym wyth ele, 
Hys savement to wynne.' 

William de Shoreham, p. 4I. 

These forms come down very close to Chaucer's day, and 
by their extremely foreign aspect, shew us how great a 
change took place in the fourteenth century. The words in 
-vieni sometimes made their plural just as they still do in 
French, namely in -mens. 

maundemens. 

' To hem that kepen his testament. And myndeful thai ben of his 
maundemens, to do hem.' — Psalm cii. 18; Hereford's version iti the Wyclif 
Bible. 

These words' had in many cases superseded a native 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 283 

word. In the Metrical Psalter, before a.d. 1300, we find in 
the corresponding verse wite-word for testament, and bodes 
for maundemens. 

-et. A French diminutive form. Examples '.—facet, 
floweret (Milton), hatchet, junket. 

An instance of its union with a Saxon word is latchet. 

Lynchet is a local word of Saxon origin which has taken 
this French facing. In the neighbourhood of Winchester 
and elsewhere along the chalk hills, it signifies 'bank/ 
'terrace,' and it has been applied to those ledges which 
have the appearance of raised beaches. It is the old Saxon 
word Mine, frequently used in Saxon charters for a boundary 
embankment, artificial or natural. So it gets attached to 
frontier wastes, as in the case of the Links of St. Andrews, 
Malvern Link, &c. In Cooper's Provincialisms of Sussex, 
a Link is defined to be ' A green or wooded bank always 
on the side of a hill between two pieces of cultivated land." 
In Jenning's Glossary of the West of England, Linch is de- 
fined as ' A ledge ; a rectangular projection,' and here we 
have the form which was frenchified into lynchet. 

-ette. Examples : — marionette, mignonette, palette, rosette. 

-let. Examples : — armlet, bracelet, branchlet, kinglet, 
ringlet. 

• I have found it necessary to make a distinction between branches and 
hranchlets, understanding by the latter term the lateral shoots which are 
produced in the same season as those from which they spring.' — John Lindley, 
A Monograph of Roses (1820), p. xxi. 

In ^age ; as baggage, burgage, carriage, cottage, lan- 
guage, lineage, message, passage, poundage, tonnage, vicarage, 
voyage. 

These words had for the most part an abstract meaning 
in their origin, and they have often grown more concrete by 
use. The word cottage, as commonly understood, is con- 



284 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Crete, but there was an older and more abstract use, accord- 
ing to which it signified an inferior kind of tenure, a use 
in which it may be classed with such words as burgage, 
soccage. The following is from a manuscript of the seven- 
teenth century, one of the many things to which I have 
access by the kindness of Mr. Furnivall in sending me 
proofs of his Early EngUsh Text materials. 

' The definition of an Esquire and the severall sortes of them according to the 
Custome and Vsage of England. 

'An Esquire called in latine Armiger, Scutifer, et homo ad arraa is he that 
in times past was Costrell to a Knight, the bearer of his sheild and heime, a 
faithfull companion and associate to him in the Warrs, serving on horsebacke, 
whereof euery knight had twoe at the least attendance upon him, in respect 
of the fee, For they held their land of the Knight by Cottage as the Knight 
held his of the King by Knight service.' — Ashmole MS. 837, art. viii. 
fol. 162. 

A beautiful use of the word personage, in the sense of 
personal appearance, occurs in the Faerie Queene, iii. 2. 26: — 

' The Damzell well did vew his Personage.' 

Carriage now signifies a vehicle for carrying; but in the 
Bible of 161 1 it occurs eight times as the collective for 
things carried, impedimenta. In Numbers iv. 24 it is a mar- 
ginal reading for ' burdens,' which is in the text. In Acts xxi. 
15, 'We tooke vp our cariages,' is rendered by Cranmer 
(1539) 'we toke vp oure burthenes,' and in the Geneva 
version (1557) ' we trussed vp our fardeles.' 

It appears to be traceable to Italian influence, as is indi- 
cated in the Bible Word-Book of Eastwood and Wright. But 
chiefly it is remarkable as one of the very few instances in 
which an ephemeral expression got into the revision of 16 11, 
displacing more solid and permanent words. 

Verbiage signifies a superfluity of words, or the excess of 
words over meaning in a discourse, or more generally, 
words without point. I asked a friend whether his speech 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 285 

had been fairly reported : ' Well/ said he, ' they have' given 
the verbiage of what I said pretty faithfully/ 

Next to -age we naturally come to the form -ager, as in 
the French passager, messager, which has been altered in 
English to the form -enger, as passenger ^ messenger. With 
these must be classed the words in -inger, as harbinger, 
porringer, pottinger, wharfinger. Also wallinger, a term that 
is, or was, to be seen on the walls of Chester, in a tablet 
commemorative of repairs done to the city wall. The 
' wallingers ' were annual officers charged with the care of 
the wall. 

In the fourteenth century there was a public officer known 
as the King's auhieger, who was a sort of inspector of the 
measuring of all cloths offered for sale, and his title was 
derived from the French aulne, an ell; aulnage, measuring 
with the ell-measure ^ 

This seems to be the best place for a word whose origin 
has been variously explained. A very great mediaeval 
word was danger, both in French and English. The reader 
of our early literature should not too readily assume that he 
has understood any passage in which this word occurs. At 
present the word is hardly to be distinguished from hazard, 
peril, risk, liability, exposure. A modern reader would not 
pause to doubt whether ' Les dangers des bois ' could mean 
anything else than ' The perils of the woods.' But it is thus 
defined by Cotgrave (161 1): — ^The amerciaments, and con- 
fiscations adiudged vnto the King by the officers of woods, and 
forrests! 

In the early poems of gallantry, which were the staple of 
Belles Lettres in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and 



^ Life and Times of Edward III, by William Longman, vol. i. p. 340 ; 
from 25 Edw. Ill, Stat. 3. 



286 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

of which the ripest example is the Roniaunt of the Rose, the 
term Danger is used constantly for the name of one of the 
allegorical personages. 

This name represents that person who, whether as father 
or husband or lover, has some superior right or title in the 
heroine of the moment. It resulted from the fundamental 
idea of these pieces, that such a person must be made odious, 
and accordingly he appears as a churl, a skulk, a spy, &c. 
Thus, in the Romaunt of the Rose, when the prospects of the 
rose-hunter are most flattering, we read, line 3015: — 

'But than a chorle, foul him betide, 
Beside the roses gan him hide. 
To keepe the roses of that rosere, 
Of whom the name was daungere : 
This chorle was hid there in the greves 
Covered with grasse and with leves. 
To spie and take whom that he fond 
Unto that roser put an hond.' 

It seems that the word must be derived from Domtnus, which 
is represented by Dan-, as in ' Dan Chaucer,' &c. Thus 
Daunger or Danger would be equivalent to Dominicarius (Du 
Cange) ; and the Domigerium of Bracton must be taken as 
a mere latinized form of the word itself. 

Thus the word is apt to occur in the phraseology of 
escheats and forfeitures, as where Mr. Froude quotes an entry 
in the Records, — 

• That on the 12th of July, 1568, the Earl of Desmond — acknowledging his 
offences, his life being in peril, his goods liable to forfeiture, and himself in 
danger to her Highness for the forfeiture of £20,000 by his securities — 
relinquished into her Majesty's hands all his lands, tenements, houses, castles, 
signeries, all he stood possessed of to receive back what her Majesty would 
please to allow him,' &c. — History of England, vol. x. p. 487. 

In The Merchant of Venice, iv. i, 'You stand within his 
danger, do you not.?' is equivalent to 'You are in his power, 
are you not?' And it is by the introduction of this word 
danger that the key-note is struck of that piece which is to 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 287 

follow, on the quality of mercy. For Power and Mercy are 
natural correlatives. And this moral truth is worked into 
the habits of our phraseology ; for it is much the same thing 
with us now to say that one is in another's power, or to say 
that he is at his mercy. The latter way of speaking was 
indeed first invented as a euphemism upon the former, but 
it has become equally harsh, perhaps rather the harsher of 
the two. One example this among thousands, that what- 
ever may be the temporary complicity of language in dis- 
simulation, no trick of words will ever compel it permanently 
to act as a cloak of hypocrisy. It has a way of recovering 
its honesty by the process of an open confession. We may 
indeed regret the degradation of noble expressions, but 
this eifect, which is at first sight so disagreeable, is found 
to be the condition of preserving language from moral 
corruption. 

This group has so marked a character that it seemed to 
deserve a place by itself, although it belongs in strictness to 
the next class in virtue of its final termination. 

In -er, from the French -er and -ier. Of this suffix -ier, 
it is said by M. Auguste Brachet, in his Grammaire His- 
torique^ p. 276^ that it is 'perhaps the most productive ' of all 
the French nounal forms. For in the first place, it is the con- 
stant form for expressing a man's trade. The Saxon form 
-ere had the same value, but it was swallowed up in the 
greater volume of this French form. 

Examples : — baker, bookbinder, butcher, Fletcher, gardener, 
grocer, miller, Tucker, vintner. Already in Chaucer we have 
four of them in two fines : — 

' An Haberdasshere and a Carpenter, 
A Webbe, a Dyere, and a Tapycer.' 

1 At p. 184 of Mr. Kitchin's Translation, in the Clarendon Press Series, 
1869. 



288 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Here the only term which is not in -er, is, oddly enough, 
a curt form of the old Saxon wehhere, weaver. 

In Bristol there is (or was) a street called Tucker Street, 
in which stood the Hall of the Weaver's Guild, till it was 
destroyed in making a new road to the railway station. This 
street is called in mediaeval deeds Vicus Fullonum, and the 
present name is to the same effect. For the word Tucker 
(anciently Toukere) is equivalent to clothier. In German the 
common word for cloth is ^u(^. 

This form is highly verbal in its constitution. It springs 
up out of almost any verb as naturally as a participle. Thus 
we .make hater, hoper, hopper, runner, talker, thinker, 
walker, &c. This spontaneity has rather suffered from 
neglect of its use. The word slanders in Troilus and Cres- 
sida, iii. 3. 84, is less to be regarded as a noun than as 
a verbal inflection : — 

' 'T is certaine, greatnesse, once falne out with fortune. 
Must fall out with men too : What the declin'd is, 
He shall as soone reade in the eyes of others, 
As feele in his owne fall : for men, like butter-flies. 
Show not their mealie wings but to the Summer : 
And not a man for being simply man, 
Hath any honour ; but honour'd for those honours 
That are without him; as place, riches, and fauour, 
Prizes of accident as oft as merit : 
Which when they fall, as being slippery standers. 
The loue that leand on them as slippery too, 
Doth one plucke downe another, and together 
Dye in the fall.' 

escaper. 

' And lehu said, If it be your minds, then let no escaper goe.' — 2 Kings 
ix. 15, margin. 

Among the signs of reviving interest in early English is 
to be noted an occasional straggler of this class welcomed 
back again. The word co??ier took the place of a Saxon 
cuma, and though its range was much narrowed by our 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 289 

adoption of the French stranger, yet it never quite died out. 
It occurs once in the Bible of 1 6 1 1 , twice in the plays of 
Shakespeare, and once in the poetical works of Milton. Of 
late it has been getting more common. 

' Christians in general, therefore, would oppose to such a creed as that of 
the Pall Mall Gazette, not the pretence of conclusions which they can 
demonstrate against all comers, but strong and deep convictions continually 
assailed and sometimes agitated by insoluble difficulties.' — J. Llewelyn Davies, 
The Gospel and Modern Life, p. xiii. 

In some instances our nouns in -er, ler, represent the 
French -lere, as river (riviere), barrier (barriere). 

There is another form, -eer, of more limited use, as mule- 
teer, charioteer, pamphleteer, privateer. 

This form is sometimes used half-playfully : 

fellow-circuiteer. 

' The enormous gains of my old fellow-circuiteer, Charles Austin, who is 
said to have made 40,000 guineas by pleading before Parliament in one 
session.' — Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, &c., 18 18. 

-ee. This termination is from the French passive par- 
ticiple. 

Examples : — devotee {Spectator, No. 354), guarantee, mort- 
gagee, trustee. 

Illustration : — 

referee. 

' In this clamour of antagonistic opinions, history is obviously the sole 
upright impartial referee.' — J. B. Lightfoot, Philippians, 1868. 

The original passive character of the form still shines out 
in most of the examples ; and often there is an active sub- 
stantive as a counterpart. Thus lessor, lessee; mortgagor, 
mortgagee. 

In -ard. Examples : — bastard, buzzard, coivard, dastard, 
u 



290 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

dotard (Spenser, Faerie Queene, iii. 9. 8), drunkard, dullard, 
haggard (a sort of hawk), laggard, mallard, niggard, pollard, 
sluggard, standard, tankard ( = a little tank, French ^tang, 
Latin stagnum), wizard. 

Here should be mentioned also two national designations, 
Spaniard, Savoyard. 

Among these must not be included mustard, of the origin 
of which word the following story has been told :— It is said 
that the first depot in Europe for the sale of sinapis was at 
Dijon, and that the jars were marked with the local motto 
Moult me tarde, which in French of the fifteenth century 
meant / am very impatient. And that to the condensation 
of this motto we owe the nouii mustard, which is an 
anglicism of the French moutarde. 

placard. 

' Good Lord, how cross and opposite is man's conceit to God's, and how 
contrary our thoughts unto His ! For even ad oppositum to this position of 
His, we see for the most part that even they that are the goers forth seem 
to persuade themselves that then they may do what they list ; that at that 
time any sin is lawful, that war is rather a placard than an inhibition to 
sin.' — Lancelot Andrewes, Sermon on Deut. xxiii. 9. 

wizard. 

' And down the wave and in the flame was borne 
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet, 
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried " The King ! 
Here is an heir for Uther ! " And the fringe 
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand, 
Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word, 
And all at once all round him rose in fire. 
So that the child and he were clothed in fire : 
And presently thereafter followed calm, 
Free sky and stars.' — Alfred Tennyson, The Coming of Arthur. 

In -Tire (Latin -ura, as mensura). 

Examples : — meastire, seizure, suture, treasure (assimilated), 
verdure. 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 29 1 

Illustration : — 

closure. 

' And for his warlike feates renowmed is, 
From where the day out of the sea doth spring, 
Untill the closure of the Evening.' 

Faerie Queene, iii. 3. 27. 

In -ise or -ice : after two or three various Latin termina- 
tions, but typically from -z/m. 

Examples : — covetise (Spenser), cowardice, fool-hardise 
(Spenser), justice, malice, merchandise, nigardise (Spenser), 
notice, queintise (Chaucer), riotise (Spenser). 

gentrise, covetise. 

' Wonder it ys sire emperour that noble gentrise 
That is so noble and eke y fuld with so fyl couetyse.' 

Robert of Gloucester, p, 46. 

feyntyse, koyntise ( = quaintise). 

' So that atte laste Gurguont was kyng 
Stalworthe man and hardy and wys thou3 alle thyng, 
Muche thing that ys eldore loren thorw feyntyse, 
Thoru strengthe he waun seththe a3ein and thoru ys koyntise.' 
Robert of Gloucester, 39. 

averice, coveytise. 

' This myraclis pleyinge is verre witnesse of mennus averice and coveytise 
byfore, that is maumetrie, as seith the apostele, for that that thei shulden 
spendyn upon the nedis of ther ne3eboris thei spenden upon the pleyis.' — A 
Sermon against Miracle-plays, in Matzner's Altenglische Sprachproben, 
Pt. II. p. 233. 

Franchise was a great word in the French period, and it 
had a wide range of significations. Among other things it 
meant privilege, exemption, and also good manners, good 
breeding, which latter occurs among the numerous render- 
ings of this word in Randle Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the 
French and English Tongves, 1 6 1 1 . 



29 3 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

franchise. 

' We mote, he sayde, be hardy and stalworthe and wyse^ 
3ef we wole habbe oure lyf, and hold our franchise.' 

Robert of Brunne, p. 155. 

' Consideryng the best on every syde, 
That fro his lust yet were him lever abyde, 
Than doon so high a cheerlinch wrecchednesse 
Agayns fraunchis of alle gentilesce.' 

Chaucer, The Franheleyjies Tale, 1. 11828, ed. Tyrwhitt. 

malice. 

' And it is a great subtilty of the devil, so to temper truth and falsehood 
in the same person, that truth may lose much of its reputation by its mixture 
with error, and the error may become more plausible by reason of its con- 
junction with truth. And this we see by too much experience ; for we see 
many truths are blasted in their reputation, because persons whom we think 
we hate upon just grounds of religion have taught them. And it was plain 
enough in the case of Maldonat, that said of an explication of a place of 
Scripture that it was most agreeable to antiquity ; bat because Calvin had so 
expounded it, he therefore chose a new one. This was malice.' — Jeremy 
Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, xi. 2. 



To this class belonged the French ^noxA pentice or j 
of which the last syllable had been already before Shak- 
speare's time anglicised into 'house/ making a sort of a 
compound, pent-house. 

We must admit into this set such words as prejudice, 
service, and we cannot make the Latin termination -itium 
a ground of distinction in English philology, where words 
are assimilated in form. 

In the sixteenth century these words were often written 
with a z. No variety of sense or even of sound appears to 
have been connected with this orthography. It was mere 
fashion. As y was a fashionable substitute for z*, and as it 
was modish to elongate words by a final e, so also with 
the 2 as a substitute for s. Queen Elizabeth wrote her 
name with a z, and that alone was an influential example. 
In some cases the fashion disappeared and left no traces 



SUBSTANTIVES — FRENCH. 2g^ 

behind it, in other cases it was the origin of the received 
orthography. Thus wizard became the recognized form 
instead of wisard, which was the spelling of Spenser, as 
may be seen above, p. 274. 

In the Faerie Queene we see this fashion well displayed. 
There are such forms as hruze, uze (iii. 5. 33), wize, disguize, 
exercize, guize (iii. 6. 23), Paradize (iii. 6. 29), enter prize, 
emprize, arize, devize (vi. i. 5). So that there is nothing to 
marvel at if we find covetise ( = covetousness) spelt covetize 
(iii. 4. 7), and the substantive which we now write practice 
written practize : — 

'Ne ought ye want but skil, which practize small 
Wil bring, and shortly make you a mayd Martiall,' (iii. 3.53) 

But there is a much more important observation to be 
made concerning this French substantive form. It seems 
that we must acknowledge it to have acted as the usher to 
one of the most extensive innovations ever inade in the 
English language. It was apparently the employment of 
this substantive as a verb that gave us our first verbs in 
-ize, and so ushered the Greek -l^eiv. An example of one 
of these substantives verbally employed may be quoted 
from the correspondence of Throgmorton and Cecil in 
1567 : — 

' They would not merchandise for the bear's skin before they had caught 
the bear.' — Quoted by J. A. Froude, History of England, vol. ix. p. 163. 

Indeed, there are instances in which the substantive of 
this form is no longer known, while the verb is in familiar 
use. Such is the verb to chastise, which appears in its 
substantive character, equivalent to chastity, in Turbervile, 
Poem to his Loue (about 1530) : — 

' And sooth it is, she liude 
in wiuely bond so well 
As she from CoUatinus wife 
of chastice bore the bell.' 



294 I'HE NOUN'GROVP, 

I imagine the case is the same with the verbs to jeopardise, 
and to advertise. Both of these I would identify with this 
substantive form, though I am not prepared with an example 
of either in its substantive character. But there is perhaps 
evidence enough in Shakspeare's pronunciation, that the 
verb to advertise was not formed from the Greek -ize. In all 
cases, though with degrees of clearness in proportion to the 
clearness of the passage, does this verb in Shakspeare sound 
as advertice, and never as now advertize : — 

' Aduertysing, and holy to your businesse.' 

Measure for Measure, v. i. 381. 

* Please it your Grace to be aduertised.* 

2 Henry VI, iv. 9. 22. 

* For by my Scouts, I was aduertised.' 

3 Henry VI, ii. I. 116. 

'I haue aduertis'd him by secret meanes.' 

3 Henry VI. iv. 5. 9. 

*We are aduertis'd by our louing friends.' 

3 Henry VI, v. 3. 18. 

* As I by friends am well aduertised.' 

Richard III, iv. 4. 501. 

' Wherein he might the King his Lord aduertise.' 
Henry VIII. ii. iv. 178. 

There is one instance in which the First Folio writes it with 
a z, and the pronunciation is not so plain, yet it is by no 
means certain even here that it is to be pronounced in the 
modern fashion : — 

'I was aduertiz'd, their Great generall slept.' 

Troylus and Cressida, ii. 3. 21 1. 

In -esse, and by anglicism -ess. Either from the Latin 
-issa, as abbatissa, or from -itia, like the last. M. Brachet 



SUBSTANTIVES— FRENCH. 295 

derives it from -zVz'^. So that it would be little more than 
a collateral form to the last. And the French language pre- 
sents us with justice and justesse, co-existent in differing 
shades of sense. 

'ExdiXw^le?,:— finesse (quite acknowledged as an English 
word, and found in Mr. Poynder's School Dictionary), 
largess. 

Riches belongs here by its extraction, as it is only an 
altered form of richesse. The grammatical conception has 
been transformed from a singular noun to a plural which has 
no singular. This may be set down as one of the effects of 
a Latin education continued during three or four centuries. 
The word richesse having been constantly used to render 
opes or divitice, which are plural forms,and being itself so 
nearly like an English plural, has thus come to be so con- 
ceived of, and written accordingly. 

Burgess has taken this shape, but it is from the French 
bourgeois, and that from the Latin burgensis. 

The form -esse as derived from -issa, has its chief im- 
portance as expressive of the feminine gender. Examples of 
this will be found at the close of the present section. 

As to the origin of all the forms in the above list, it 
clearly cannot belong to English philology to do much more 
than indicate the source from which we received them. 
Their derival into French from Latin has therefore been 
only slightly touched upon. The reader who wishes to 
know more on this head should consult the Historical 
Grammar of the French Tongue, by Auguste Brachet, an 
admirable manual, which has been rendered accessible to 
the English student by Mr. Kitchin's Translation, This 
book supplies all the information which is needed for tracing 
the forms intelligently from the Latin through the French, 
to the threshold of their entrance into the English language. 



2g6 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

The effect of the French pre-occupation of our language 
was not limited to the period of its reign. It also imparted 
a tinge to the subsequent period of classic influence. The 
Latin words that were next admitted into English, became 
subject to those French forms which were already familiar 
among us. 

-aey, from the Latin -aci'a, 2,'^ fallacy. 

-ance and -ancy, from the Latin -antia ; as substance^ 
constancy. The words acquaintance, cognisatice, and many- 
others of this form, are rather French than Latin. 

Illustration : — 

cognisance. 

' The honourable member ought himself to be aware that in this house 
we have no cognisance of what passes in debate in the other house.' — 
House of Commons, July 21, 1869. 

-ence and -ency, from the Latin -entia. 

Examples : — affluence, beneficence, benevolence, competence, 
confidence, conscience, consequence, continence, difference, dif- 
fidence, eminence, evidence, exigence, experience, impotence, 
influence, licence, magnificence, munificence, negligence, opulence, 
preference, reticence, science, sequence. 

Illustration : — 

pubescence. 

' Pubescence on the branches, peduncles, or tube of the calyx is the only 
invariable character I have discovered in Roses. Distinctions drawn from it 
I have every reason to consider absolute.' — John Lindley, A Monograph of 
Roses (1820), p. xxiii. 

The following are of a different origin, being either from 
Latin nouns in -ensio, or from Latin participles in -ensus, but 
they have been assimilated to this group. Such are defence, 
expence (obsolete), offence, pretence. With these may be men- 
tioned a few which have not succumbed to this assimilation, 
as incense, sense, suspense, and one which has recovered its 
original classical consonant, namely expense. 



SUBSTANTIVES — LATIN. 297 

The -eney form is peculiarly English. Clemency is in 
French demence. 

-ity, from the Latin -itas ', as quality, vanity. The English 
termination is after the French -ite, with the last syllable ac- 
cented, because it represents the two syllables of the Latin 
accusative -tatem. 

Examples : — antiquity, benignity, civility, dexterity, equality, 
fidelity, gratuity, humanity, integrity, joviality, legibility, ma- 
jority, nativity, obscurity, posterity, quality, rapidity, sincerity, 
timidity, urbanity, velocity. 

Illustration : — 

civility, equity, humanity, morality, security. 

' The morality of our earthly life, is a morality which is in direct subser- 
vience to our earthly accommodation ; and seeing that equity, and humanity, 
and civility, are in such visible and immediate connection w^ith all the secu- 
rity and all the enjoyment which they spread around them, it is not to be 
wondered at that they should throw over the character of him by whom 
they are exhibited, the lustre of a grateful and a superior estimation.' — 
Thomas Chalmers, Sermons in Tron Church, Glasgow (1819), Sermon V. 

Among these, the forms in -osity have acquired a pro- 
minence, as animosity, curiosity, impetuosity, pomposity. 

Mulier osity is quoted by Dr. Trench {On Some Deficiencies 
in our English Dictionaries, p. 7) from Henry More, with 
the observation that it expresses what no other word in the 
language would do. He has also produced others of this 
type from writers of the seventeenth century, as fabulosity, 
populosity, speciosity. The latter also from Henry More. 

' So great a glory as all the speciosities of the world could not equalize.' — - 
On GodltTiess, iv. 12. § 4. 

The words in which this formative appears merely as -ty, 
are of an early mediaeval French strain. 

Examples : — casualty, certainty, fealty, loyalty, mayoralty, 
nicety , novelty , royalty, shrievalty, soverainty, surety. 



298 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

chiefeiy, souverainety. 

' I could wish that in this discourse and in the whole body of your booke 
wheresoever mention is made of to Kvpiov, you should give yt the same 
name. You terme yt sometymes chiefety of dominion, sometymes souverain- 
ety, sometimes imperiall power. I thinke theys wordes (souverainety of 
dominion or souveraine dominion) are the fittest to be alwayes used, and 
plainest to be understood. If you be of this mynd, you may alter those 
places before, and make them all alike.* — George Cranrher, MS. Notes on 
Hookers Sixth Book. Hooker's Works, ed. Keble, vol. iii. p. 1 14. 

-ion, -tion, -ation, -ition, from the Latin -zo, -ah'o, -t'h'o, 
genitive -zom's; as coronation, description, region, compassion, 
contrition, 

salutation, 

' We behold men, to whom are awarded, by the universal voice, all the 
honours of a proud and unsullied excellence — and their walk in the world 
is dignified by the reverence of many salutations — and as we hear of their 
truth and their uprightness, and their princely liberalities,' &c. — Thomas 
Chalmers, Sermon V. (1819.) 

The exigency of translation occasionally projects new 
specimens, as 

externalization. 

' The utter externalization of the religious consciousness by superstitious 
usages, and the consequent fading of the sense of moral personality and 
responsibility.' — Bunsen, God in History. Translated by S. Winkworth, 
Bk. III. ch. vii. 

This is a form upon which new words have been made 
with great facility, as witness the off-hand words savation, 
starvation. A gardener once desiring to have his work 
admired— he had been moving some of the raspberries, to 
make the rows more regular — 'There sir,' cried he, 'that's 
what I call row-tation now!' From this facility it has 
naturally followed that many have grown obsolete. Jeremy 
Taylor uses luxatio7i to signify the disturbing, disjointing, 
disconcerting, shocking of the understanding : 

' An honest error is better than a hypocritical profession of truth, or a 
violent luxation of the understanding.' — Liberty of Prophesying, ix. 2. 



S UBS TA NTIVES — LA TIN. 299 

Perhaps this word is not quite obsolete in its physical 
sense. It originally meant the putting a limb out of joint, 
and possibly it is still so employed by surgeons. 

Dr. Trench, in his pamphlet On Some Deficiencies in our 
English Dictionaries (1857), has cited the following words 
now obsolete but once used by good authors, subsannation, 
coaxation, delinition, conculcation, quadripartition, excarni- 
fication, dehonestation. The reader who desires further in- 
formation on any of these words is referred to the above 
work. 

This abstract form is capable of a thundering eloquence, 
under conditions fitted to exhibit its full effects. When a new 
ship of war of the most advanced and formidable class of 
turret-ships was lately announced by the name of ' The 
Devastation,' it might well be said that the new cast of name 
was an apt exponent of the weight of metal by which the 
terrors of marine warfare have recently been enhanced. 

-our; as ardour, fervour. 

In this class of words, derived at secondhand from the 
Latin in -or, as fervor, ardor, the « is a trace of the 
French medium. This distortion has moreover communi- 
cated itself even where there was previously nothing either of 
French or of Latin, as in the purely Saxon compound neigh- 
bour {neh = nigh, gebilr = dweller). 

A partial disposition has manifested itself to drop this 
French tc. Especially is this observable in American litera- 
ture. But the general rule holds good through this whole 
series of nouns from the Latin, that what we call 'anglicising' 
them, is the reducing of them to a set of forms which we 
borrowed originally from French. And thus it is true that 
the French influence still accompanies us, even through the 
course of our latinising epoch. 

Latin scholarship was, however, continually nibbling 



300 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

away at these monuments of the French reign. The forms 
of many of our Romanesque nouns were too permanently 
fixed to be shaken, but wherever the classical scholar could 
make an English word more like Latin, he was fain to do it. 

Thus the French form parlement was drawn nearer to its 
Latin form of parliamentum ; and words of old standing, 
like Cristen, as old in our speech as the national con- 
version, became re-latinized into Christian. 

-al. This form, which is derived from the Latin adjectival 
formative -alis^ -ale, has attached itself not only to words 
radically Latin, as acquittal, dismissal, disposal, nuptials, pro- 
posal, refusal, rental, but also to others which are purely 
English, as in the familiar geological term upheaval. Pro- 
fessor Lightfoot in his Paul and Seneca, uses the uncommon 
word uprootal. 

Illustrations : — 

testimonial. 

' And thus it is, that there is a morahty of this world, which stands in 
direct opposition to the humbling representations of the Gospel ; which can- 
not comprehend what it means by the utter worthlessness and depravity of 
our nature ; which passionately repels this statement, and that too on its own 
consciousness of attainments superior to those of the sordid and the pro- 
fligate and the dishonourable; and is fortified in its resistance to the truth 
as it is in Jesus, by the flattering testimonials which it gathers to its re- 
spectability and its worth from the various quarters of human society.' — 
Thomas Chalmers, Sermon V. (1819). 

approval, refusal. 

' I well remember his [O'Connell's] smile as he nodded good-humouredly 
to us as we passed him, and I must say it was one of approval rather than 
otherwise at our refusal to do him homage.' — W. Steuart Trench, Realities 
of Irish Life, p. 39. 

A word which does not belong here, but which has assumed 
the guise of this set, is bridal, from the Saxon beyd ( = bride), 
and EALO ( = ale), so that it really meant the ale or festivity 
of the bride. One or two other compounds on this model, 
such as church-ale, scot-ale, have become obsolete. 



SUBSTA NTIVES — LA TIN. 3OI 

Another word, which has an equally deceptive appearance 
of being formed with the Latin -al is burial. This is a pure 
Saxon word from its first letter to its last. The Saxon form 
is byrigels, a form which is of the singular number, though it 
ends with s. The plural was hyrigehas. 

The termination -ary, direct from the Latin -arms (French 
-aire), is, like the former, originally adjectival ; but it has 
some substantives. 

Examples : — contemporary, fiduciary. 

' Under no circumstances whatever can a trustee appropriate to himself the 
property of which he is the fiduciary.' — House of Commons, March 18, 
1869. 

-tude, from the Latin substantives in -tudo, -tudinis. 
Examples : — gratitude, disquietude, latitude, longitude, mag- 
nitude, multitude, solicitude, turpitude, vicissitude. 

turpitude. 

' There is ever with you, lying folded in the recesses of your bosom, and 
pervading the whole system both of your desires and of your doings, that 
which gives to sin all its turpitude, and all its moral hideousness in the sight 
of God. There is a rooted preference of the creature to the Creator. — 
Thomas Chalmers, Sermon III. (1819). 

disquietude. 

' Look around this congregation. "We are all more or less the children of 
sorrow. There is not one of us who has not within him some known or 
secret cause of disquietude.' — Charles Bradley, Clapham 'Sermons, 1831, 
Sermon VII. 

solicitude. 

' The excellent breed of sheep, which early became the subject of legis- 
lative solicitude, furnished them with an important staple.' — William H. Pres- 
cott, Ferdinand and Isabella, vol. i. p. 29 (ed. 1 838), 

The substantives in -ite must be reckoned among the 
Latin ones, as we received the form through the Latin ; but 
it is Greek by origin. 

It was of European celebrity in the middle ages as a 



302 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

class-word, especially for sects and opinions. The fol- 
lowers of the early heresies were thus designated, as Ophites, 
Caimles, Monothelites, Maroniies, Marcionifes, Monophysites. 
Yet the odium which now attaches to this form cannot 
have been felt in the sixteenth century, or our Bible would 
not show the form so generally as it does, not only in such 
cases as the Canaanttes, Perizzites, Hivites, 2Xi6. Jebusites, but 
also in the Levtfes, Gadites, Manassites, and Bethlehemite. 

Already, however, at the close of the seventeenth century, 
we find the ecclesiastical historian Jeremy Collier, using the 
term Widiffists, as if with purpose to avoid writing Wiclifite. 
And thus in our own time the alumni of Winchester are 
justly sensitive about being called Wykehamites instead of 
Wykehamists. 

The fact is, that with our sensitiveness about religious 
differences, this form has become almost odious; and we 
scruple to quote instances of its appHcation out of respect 
for names that may be embodied. Suffice it for illustration 
to put down such as Joanna- Southcotites and Mormonites. 

Still, there are terms of speech in which it may come in 
harmlessly or even pleasantly : — 

' Whilst the trial was going on, and the issue still uncertain, I met Cole- 
ridge, who said, "Well, Robinson, you are a Queenite, I hope?" — "Indeed 
I am not," — " How is that possible ? " — " I am only an anti-Kingite." — 
" That's just what I mean." ' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, 1820. 

A considerable number of Latin and Greek words have 
been adopted in their original and unaltered forms. Such 
are, abacus, animus, apparatus, arcafia, area, arena, basis, 
census, chaos, circus, cosmos, compendium, deficit, epitome, 
equilibrium, fungus, index, interest, item, medium, memento, 
memorandum, minutice, modicum, oasis, odium, onus, overplus 
(Numbers iii. Contents), phenomenon, requiem, residuum, 
stigma, stimulus, terminus, vortex. 



SUBSTANTIVES — LATIN, ETC. 303 

Jane Austen censured one of her nieces for writing about 

a ' vortex of dissipation/ the expression was so intolerably 

hackneyed. 

arcana. 

' They may not yet see the arcana of the temple, but they may see the 
road which leads to the temple.' — Thomas Chalmers, Sermons in Tron 
Church, Glasgow, 1819; p. 98. 

epitoyne. 

'Paul's walk is the land's epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of 
Great Britain. It is more than this, the whole world's map, which you may 
here discern in its perfectest motion, justling and turning.' — ^John Earle, 
Microcosmography , ed. BHss, 181 1 ; p. 116. 

interest. 

' He hates our sacred Nation ; and he railes 
Even there where Merchants most doe congregate, 
On me, my bargaines, and my well-worne thrift, 
Which he cals interrest : Cursed be my trybe 
If I forgive him.' — Merchant of Venice, i. I. 

interest (in another sense). 

' " Ye think," wrote Grange to Randolph, " ye think by the division that 
is among us, ye will be judge and party ; ye have wrecked Teviotdale, your 
mistress's honour is repaired, and I pray you seek to do us no more harm, 
for in the end you will lose more than you can gain. The Queen your 
mistress shall spend mickle silver, and tyne our hearts in the end ; for what- 
ever you do to any Scotchman the haill nation will think their own interest.' 
— J. A. Froude, History of England, April, 1 5 70. 

medium. 

' Madame de Stael said, and the general remark is true, " The English 
mind is in the middle between the German and the French, and is a medium 
of communication between them,"' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, vol. i. p. 175. 

There are a certain number of nouns which have come 
to us through the French, from the southern Romance lan- 
guages. Such are those Spanish words in 

-ad, -ade, which represent the termination -atus of the 
Latin participle — esplanade, fusillade, lemonade, promenade, 
marmalade, masquerade, salad. 



304 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Illustration: — 

fusillade. 

' Everybody acquainted with country life must be aware of the commotion 
created in some of our villages by the first fall of snow, especially if it 
happens on a Sunday. Old and young turn out, leaving the parson to edify 
women and empty pews, and high up on the hills and down in the valleys 
such a fusillade ensues on the day of rest as could hardly be justified by any 
event short of the landing of French invaders upon our shores,' 

Round by the Spanish peninsula have also come to us 
those English (or rather European) nouns which are de- 
rived from Arabic, as alchemy, alcohol, alcove, algebra, 
almanac, ammiral (Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 294), cipher, 
elixir, magazine, nadir, zenith. 

To these we must add a word, once celebrated, though 
now obsolete, algorithm, or more familiarly, augrim. Also 
sometimes, algorism, after the French form algorisme. This 
Arabic word was the universal term in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries to denote the science of calculation by 
nine figures and zero, which was gradually superseding the 
abacus with its counters. 

' I shall reken it syxe times by aulgorisme, or you can caste it ones by 
counters.' — John Palsgrave, French Grammar, 1530!^. 

Coming now to Greek formations, the most conspicuous 
are the following : — 

Nouns in -y from Greek words in -m and -€ia ; as irotiy, 
tyranny. 

irony (^elpoiveiaj. 

' There was no mockery in Miss Austen's irony. However heartily we 
laugh at her pictures of human imbecility, we are never tempted to think that 
contempt or disgust for human nature suggested the satire.' 

synonymy (o-vvawfjiia). 

' As the synonomy is one of the most difficult and perhaps important parts 
of the subject, it has of course received particular attention. But I have 

^ Mr. Albert Way's note in Pro^nptorhwi Parvulonon, p. iS. 



SUBSTANTIVES — GREEK. 305 

rarely been very anxious about the synonyms of botanists of an earlier date 
than the time of Linnaeus, on account of the extreme uncertainty of the pre- 
cise plants which they intended/ — John Lindley, A Monograph of Roses, 
1820; p. ix. 

threnody {6pr]vcdhia). 

' We crave not a memorial stone 
For those who fell at Marathon : 
Their fame with every breeze is blent, 
The mountains are their monument. 
And the low plaining of the sea 
Their everlasting threnody.' 

The Three Fountains (1869), p. 1 00. 

In -ism from the Greek -khios ; as atheism, idolism 
(Milton), modernism (Sir A. Grant, The Ancient Stoics), 
propagandism, ventriloquism. 

catechism. 

' The objection to catechisms in the abstract is simply an objection to 
systematic religious teaching.' — Feb. 16, 1870. 

Scotticism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Preshyterianism. 

'For our part, we should say that the special habit or peculiarity 
which distinguishes the intellectual manifestations of Scotchmen — that, 
in short, in which the Scotticism of Scotchmen most intimately consists 
— is the habit of emphasis. All Scotchmen are emphatic. If a Scotch- 
man is a fool, he gives such emphasis to the nonsense he utters, 
as to be infinitely more insufferable than a fool of any other country; 
if a Scotchman is a man of genius, he gives such emphasis to the good 
things he has to communicate, that they have a supremely good chance 
of being at once or very soon attended to. This habit of emphasis, we 
believe, is exactly that perfervidum ingenium Scotorum which used to be 
remarked some centuries ago, wherever Scotchmen were known. But em- 
phasis is perhaps a better word than fervour. Many Scotchmen are fervid 
too, but not all ; but all, absolutely all, are emphatic. No one will call 
Joseph Hume a fervid man, but he is certainly emphatic. And so with 
David Hume, or Reid, or Adam Smith, or any of those colder-natured 
Scotchmen of whom we have spoken; fervour cannot be predicated of them, 
but they had plenty of emphasis. In men like Burns, or Chalmers, or Irving, 
on the other hand, there was both emphasis and fervour ; so also with 
Carlyle ; and so, under a still more curious copibination, with Sir William 
Hamilton. And as we distinguish emphasis from fervour, so would we dis- 
tinguish it from perseverance. Scotchmen are said to be persevering, but the 
saying is not universally true ; Scotchmen are or are not morally persevering. 



3o6 



THE NOUN-GROUP. 



but all Scotchmen are intellectually emphatic. Emphasis, we repeat, intel- 
lectual emphasis, the habit of laying stress on certain things rather than 
co-ordinating all, in this consists what is essential in the Scotticism of 
Scotchmen. And, as this observation is empirically verified by the very 
manner in which Scotchmen enunciate their words in ordinary talk, so it 
might be deduced scientifically from what we have already said regarding the 
nature and effects of the feeling of nationality. The habit of thinking em- 
phatically is a necessary result of thinking much in the presence of, and in 
resistance to, a negative ; it is the habit of a people that has been accus- 
tomed to act on the defensive, rather than of a people peacefully self-evolved 
and accustomed to act positively ; it is the habit of Protestantism rather 
than of Catholicism, of Presbyterianism rather than of Episcopacy, of Dissent 
rather than of Conformity.' — David Masson, Essays (1856); 'Scottish 
Influence in British Literature.' 

Sioi'a'sm. 

' Stoicism was in fact the earliest offspring of the union between the reli- 
gious consciousness of the East and the intellectual culture of the West.' — 
Professor Lightfoot, St. Paul and Seneca. 

ventriloquism. 

' Coleridge praised " Wallenstein," but censured Schiller for a sort of ven- 
triloquism in poetry. By-the-by, a happy term to express that common 
fault of throwing the sentiments and feelings of the writer into the bodies 
of other persons, the characters of the poem.' — Henry Crabb Robinson, 
Diary, &c., vol. i. p. 396. 

truism. 

' But after this explanation you will perhaps be disposed to think me 
guilty of a truism ; for it now appears that when I said that the study of 
history is indispensable to the politician, all I meant was that a politician 
must needs study politics. But is it a truism to say this ? Is it a truism to 
say that a politician must study politics? I fear not.' — Professor Seeley, 
Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge. 

How readily new words are builded on this model may 
be seen from the following instances : — 

' The three schools of geological speculation which I have termed Catas- 
trophism, UniformifariaJiisTn, and Evolutionism, are commonly supposed to 
be antagonistic to one another.' — Address of the President of the Geological 
Society, 1869, 

landlordism. 

' The sum of the whole matter may be briefly stated : — If the tenant under 
the bill will enjoy security of tenure, it is subject to the condition that he 
does his duty to the landlord and to the proprietor ; if the landlord finds his 



SUBSTANTIVES — GREEK. 307 

powers nominally abridged, they are abridged only on the side of arbitrary 
authority — capricious eviction, all that in Ireland goes by the name of 
" landlordism "—while he remains master of his estate so far as to secure 
its due cultivation in a proper course of industry, and so far as to be entitled 
to receive the surplus profits after the farmer is repaid for his industry and 
the capital he sinks in its cultivation.' — (February 17, 1870.) 

These nouns are in fact now formed just as readily as 
the verbs in -z'ze, from which the noun-formative -z'sm is an 
outgrowth. 

And so is the formative -ist; as atheist, egotist, idolist 
(Milton), 77ies7}ierist, publicist, ritualist, WykehajJiist, minis- 
terialist (Sir Stafford Northcote, in Times, April 29, 1869; 
Letter to Editor.) 

publicist. 

' The same evening I had an introduction to one who, in any place but 
Weimar, would have held the first rank, and who in his person and bearing 
impressed every one with the feeling that he belonged to the highest class 
of men. This was Herder. The interview was, if possible, more insig- 
nificant than that with Goethe — partly, perhaps, on account of my being 
introduced at the same time with a distinguished publicist, to use the 
German term, the eminent political writer and statesman, Friedrich Gentz, 
the translator of Burke on the French Revolution,' — H, C. Robinson, Diary, 
1801. 

indiffer enlist. 

' There are, ' it is true, men who. without any knowledge of history, are 
hot politicians, but it would be better for them not to meddle with politics 
at all 1 there are men who, knowing something of history, are indiiferentists 
in politics ; it is because they do not know history enough.' — Professor Seeley, 
Inaugural Lecture. 

dogmatist. 

' In short, past history is a dogmatist, furnishing for every doubt ready- 
made and hackneyed determinations. Present history is a Socrates, knowing 
nothing, but guiding others to knowledge by suggestive interrogations.' — Id. 
ibid. 

Infallibilist. 

* The concluding words of this Schema appear to us to embody all that 
has ever been contended for by the most: extreme advocates of the cause. 
" Hence we teach, with the approval of the Holy Council, and define as a 
dogma of faith, that, by the Divine assistance, the Roman Pontiff, of whom, 
in the person of St. Peter, it has likewise been said by our Lord Jesus 
Christ, ' I have prayed for thee,' &c., cannot err when, acting as the highest 

X 2 



3o8 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

teacher of all Christians, he authoritatively defines what should be adhered to 
by the whole Church in matters of faith and morals ; and that this preroga- 
tive of incapability to err, or infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, is equally 
extensive with the infallibility of the Church. If any one should presume to 
contradict this our definition, let him know that he thereby falls away from 
the truth of the faith." If this language be adopted by the Council, mild 
though it maybe in comparrison with other texts which have been projected, 
the Infallibilists will have gained the day.' — (March, 1870.) 

But fond as we appear to be of the Greek verbs in -ize and 
the Greek nouns in -ism, -isf, we have drawn very Httle from 
a Greek form that lies close beside these. There are Greek 
verbs in -aze, and corresponding noun-forms in -asm, -ast, 
which have been almost neglected by us. Perhaps we ought 
to rank among our English nouns those 

In -asm, having lately heard so much of protoplasm, and 
having also the well-established words chasm, spasm, pleo- 
nasm. 

chasm. 

'On the night 
When Uther in Tintagil past away 
Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two 
Left the still king, and passing forth to breathe, 
Then from the castle gateway by the chasm 
Descending thro' the dismal night — a night 
In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost — 
Beheld so high upon the dreary deeps 
It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof 
A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stern 
Bright with a shining people on the decks, 
And gone as soon as seen.' 

Alfred Tennyson, The Coming of Arthur. 

' And felt the boat shock earth, and looking up, 
Beheld the enchanted towers of Carbonek, 
A caslle like a rock upon a rock, 
With chasm-like portals open to the sea, 
And steps that met the breaker ! ' 

Id. The Holy Grail. 

And also -ast. For the recent protoplasm has its counter- 
part in an eidti protoplast, which had its day under the reign 
of other theories. The word was used to designate the 



SUBSTANTIVES— CURTAILED. 309 

' first-formed ' (TrpcoTOTrXao-Tos), that is to say Adam. Men 
theorised in the days of protoplast just as hardily as they do 
in these days of protoplasm. For Richardson quotes Glan- 
vill in a book entitled The Vanity of Dogmatizing, saying: — 

' Upon such considerations, to me it appears to be most reasonable, that 
the circumference of our protoplast's senses should be the same with that of 
nature's activity : unless we will derogate from his perfections, and so reflect 
a disparagement on him that made us.' 

In conclusion, we will notice a group of nouns of a pecu- 
liarly national stamp. They are easy and familiar expres- 
sions formed by a curtailment of longer words, and are 
mostly monosyllabic. It is generally but not always the 
first part that has been retained. Thus for ' speculation ' we 
hear spec, for ' omnibus ' bus, for ' cabriolet ' cab, for ' incog- 
nito ' i7icog. The curt expression of tick for credit is as old 
as the seventeenth century, and is corrupted from ticket, as a 
tradesman's bill was formerly called. John Oldham (1683) 
has: — 

' Reduced to want, he in due time felt sick, 
Was fain to die, and be interred on tick.' 

If it appear below the dignity of philology to notice such 
half-recognised slang, let it be remembered that this science 
is quite as much concerned with first efforts, of however 
uncouth an aspect, as it is with those mature forms which 
enjoy the most complete literary sanction. The words 
which one generation calls slang, are not unfrequently the 
sober and decorous terrris of that which succeeds. The 
term bus has made for itself a very tolerable position, 
and cab is absolutely established. The curt form of gent 
as a less ceremonious substitute for the full expression 
of ' gentleman,' had once made considerable way, but its 
career was blighted in a court of justice. It is about 
twenty years ago that two young men, being brought 



3IO THE NOUN-GROUP. 

before a London magistrate, described themselves as 'gents.' 
The magistrate said that he considered that a designation 
little better than ' blackguard.' The abbreviate form has 
never been able to recover that shock. 

A more respectable example of a curt form is the title 
Jlli'ss, which, though nothing but the first syllable of Mistress, 
has won its way to an honoured position. 

Already in 171 1, Mr. Spectator, in an interesting paper for 
the study of the English language, No. 135, commented 
upon the tendency of these curt forms to get themselves 
estabHshed. 

' It is perhaps this humour of speaking no more than we needs must, which 
has so miserably curtailed some of our words, that in familiar writings and 
conversations they often lose all but their first syllables, as " mob. rep. pos. 
incog." and the like ; and as all ridiculous words make their first entry into 
a language by familiar phrases, I dare not answer for these, that they will 
not in time be looked upon as part of our tongue.' 

In fact, these words have a crude and fragmentary look 
only while they are recent. Give time enough, and the 
abruptness disappears. Who now thinks of 7?iok (talpa) as 
a curt form of moldhvarp the mouldcaster .? Who finds it 
vulgar to say Consols, though this is but a curt way of saying 
Consolidated Annuities ? A peal of bells is even an elegant 
expression, although it is curtailed from appeal. Story is 
a pretty word, though curt for history. But it has always 
borne a comparatively familiar sense, as it does to the pre- 
sent day. It is only used twice in the text of our Bible, 
and then to represent midrash, that is, commentary upon 
history rather than history. But into the contents of the 
chapters, which are couched in homelier speech, we find it 
more readily admitted. Thus in Deuteronomy : — 

'Chap. I. Moses' speech in the end of the fortieth yeere, briefly rehearsing 
the story, &c.' 

' Chap. II. The story is continued, &c.' 

' Chap. III. The story of the cotiqvest of Og king of Bash an* 



SUBSTANTIVES — CURT FORMS. 3II 

Curtailments which are now obsolete, are in some cases 
preserved to us in compound words. Thus the word cobweb 
seems to indicate that the attercop (old word for spider) was 
curtly called a cop or cob. 

We have been very easy in our admission of long classic 
words; nay, we have exhibited a large appetite for them. 
But there still lingers the Saxon taste for the monosyllable, 
and it often breaks out in the writer of fine taste, when for 
a moment he feels unawed by critical observers. A clear 
example of this occurs in a letter of Keble's, wherein he has 
adopted the highly expressive word splotch. 

' We have two girls and little Edward with us, and a great splotch of 
sunshine they make in the house.' — Life of Kehle, p. 394. 

This word has its habitat in Oxfordshire, where school- 
children may be heard to use it in speaking of a blot on 
their copybooks. 

There has been in our time a visible reaction against the 
tyranny of long words, in favour of the despised monosyllable. 
We have not indeed arrived at the decision 

' To banish from the nation, 
All long-tail'd words in osity and ation^ 

Frere's Whistlecraft. 

But ostentation and pride of invention is now seen at least 
as often in short or Saxon-like words as it is in the long- 
robed words of classic sweep. Perhaps it may be the case 
that the Americans are leading the way in this. Certain it 
is that words of this character do win their way into English 
literature from across the Atlantic. The following introduc- 
tion of a new word is in point. 

' Boston is the huh of the world. So say those who, not being Massa- 
chusetts men themselves, are disposed to impute extravagant pretensions to 
the good old Puritan city. The huh, in the language of America, is the 



312 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

nave, or centre-piece of the wheel, from which the spokes radiate, and on 
which the wheel turns. As the Americans make with their hickory wood 
the best wheels in the world, they have some right to give to one of the 
pieces a name of their own. But, however, Boston need not quarrel with 
the saying. Nations, like individuals, are generally governed by ideas, and 
no people to such a degree as the Americans : and the ideas which have 
governed them hitherto have been supplied from New England. But Mas- 
sachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel 
within Massachusetts. It has therefore been the first source and foundation 
of the ideas that have moved and made America ; and is, in a high and 
honourable sense, the huh of the New World.' — F. Barham Zincke, Last 
Winter in the United States (1868), p. 279. 

Familiar abbreviations of Christian names belong here. 
They are commonly made, with alteration or without, from 
the first syllable ^. Will, Tom, Wat (from Walter, according 
to its old faded-French pronunciation Water), Sam, &c. 

These are specially liable to alteration from the caprices 
of the little folk among whom they are most current, and 
to this cause (mixed with the imperfection of the childish 
organs of speech and the fondness which elder brothers and 
sisters have for propagating the original speeches of the little 
ones) must be assigned such forms as Bob for Rob, Bill for 
Will, Dick for Rich. Mr. Charles Dickens signed his writings 
' Boz ' after a childish alteration of the first syllable of Moses, 
which was a Christian name in his family. In the case of 
names beginning with a vowel, the curt form takes a con- 
sonant, as Ned, Noll, Nell, for Edward, Oliver, and Ellen. 

While we are upon these familiar appellations, we may 
as well complete the list by noticing some which do not 
spring from the causes here under consideration. Harry 
for Henry is a rough English imitation of the sound of the 
French Henri ; Jack is the YYQYi.Q}i\ Jacques, which has attached 
itself somehow to the English John. 

^ The Germans, having a diminutival form =d)en, which attaches to the 
end of a word, are thus naturally led to preserve the final syllable in their 
familiar abbreviations of Christian names, as C&r£tcl)£n, ^ibtU^^lt, (!truXlct)cn, 
from Margarethe, Charlotte, Gertrude. 



SUBSTANTIVES — SLANG FORMS. 313 

A survey of English nouns would indeed be deficient 
which should omit that curt, stunt, slang element to which 
we as a nation are so remarkably prone, and in regard to 
which we stand in such contrast with our adoptive sister. 
The French language shrinks from such things as it were 
from an indecorum. Our pubHc-school and university life 
is a great wellhead of new and irresponsible words. Gra- 
dually they find their way into literature. For example : — 

ckaf. 

' He wishes to confound the whole school of those who think that a faith 
is to be tested by the inward experience of life. And so he sets himself to 
overwhelm Mr. Hughes v/ith ridicule, rioting in that kind of banter vulgarly 
described as " chaff," and bringing up against him the stock difficulties which 
can always be cast in the way of belief.' — J. Llewelyn Davies, The Gospel 
and Moderfi Life, p. xviii. 

And as such words in shoals proceed from the gathering- 
places of young Saxons, so also a kindred work is being 
achieved by that young Saxon world which lives beyond the 
western main. It almost seems as if they, or a certain school 
among them, were bent on raising a standard of rebellion, 
and were resolved to dispute that superiority which the classic 
tongues have so long exercised over our barbarian language. 
Nothing in American literature bears such a stamp of 
originality and determination as those writings in M^hich 
reverence for antiquity is utterly cast aside, and their old 
obedience to the King's English is thrown to the winds. 
The genial and suasive satire of the Biglow Papers, as well 
as the mocking horse-laugh of Hafis Breit?jiann, are at one 
• in their contemptuous rejection of the old senatorial dignity 
of language. It is in both cases an audacious renunciation 
of the long captivity in which our speech and literature have 
been held under classic sway, and it seems to us at first sight 
as little less than an impudent assertion of the prior claims 



314 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

of familiarity and barbarism. But it cannot be denied that 
Mr. Lowell has practically demonstrated the power of mind 
over matter, the power of resolution over restraint, the 
superiority of thought in literature over every conventional 
limit that can be imposed upon the forms of expression. It 
is an assertion of the natural freedom of dialect and lan- 
guage and diction. Who, with any feeling for humour, can 
refuse to condone the literary audacity of the following? 
Nay, who can refuse to it a certain degree of admiration .? 

' I've noticed that each half-baked scheme's abettors 
Are in the habbit o' producin' letters. 
Writ by all sorts o' never-heerd-on fellers 
'Bout as oridgenal ez the wind in bellers ; 
I've noticed tu, it's the quack med'cines gits 
(An' needs) the grettest heap o' stiflfykits.' 

Or who with any love of nature can let the dialect blind him 

to the burst of real poetry that there is in this description of 

the New England spring, ' that gives one leap from April 

into Tune'.? — 

-' I 

' Then all comes crowdin' "m ; afore you think 
The oak-buds mist the side-hill woods with pink, 
The cat-bird in the laylock bush is loud. 
The orchards turn to heaps o' rosy cloud, 
In ellum-shrouds the flashin' hangbird clings, 
An' for the summer vy'ge his hammock slings, 
All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers 

The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers 

'Nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year. 

Gladness on wings, the boboHnk is here ; 

Half hid in tip-top apple blooms he swings 

Or climbs against the breeze with quivering wings. 

Or givin' way to 't in a mock despair 

Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air.' 

Mr. Lowell's dialect is the true Yankee, the speech of the 
Northern farmer. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Leland's 
poetry represents any existing form of speech, but it is 
described as Pennsylvanian German. 



S UBSTA NTIVES — FLEXION. 3 1 5 

Inflection of Substantives. 

This consists almost entirely of the letter s attached to 
the noun for the expression of the genitive singular: and 
the same letter does duty for the plural. The latter feature 
is due to French influence. There was in Saxon a group 
of masculine nouns which made its plural in -as. Thus : — 



Singular. 


Plural. 


smi^ (smith) 


smi'Sas 


ende (end) 


endas 


dsEg (day) 


dagas 


cynmg (king) 


cyningas 


weg (way) 


wegas 


stasf (^letter) 


stafas 



This old plural s is one of the points by which our near- 
ness to the Moeso-Gothic is indicated. In that dialect the 
s plural has a very much larger incidence than in Anglo- 
Saxon. In fact it applies to all the masculine and feminine 
nouns of the dialect. In the Old- and Middle-High German 
it is untraceable. In the Scandinavian dialects it is repre- 
sented by R. In the Old-Saxon alone (besides the Moeso- 
Gothic) do we find the plural s : there it holds much the 
same sort of place as in Anglo-Saxon. 

The Saxon influence of this plural will not be highly 
esteemed, when it is considered that of the nine Anglo-Saxon 
declensions made by Rask, this group occupies only one. 
The really dominant plural-form in Saxon times was that 
in -an, which later was written -en and -yn. Out of Rask's 
nine declensions three formed their plurals thus, one for 
each gender. Of these we still retain some little relics, as in 
the plural oxe7t. To this we may add the form eyne for eyes, 
which is not altogether obsolete. It is occasionally used 
even now in the higher forms of poetry. In Chaucer's time 



3l6 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

it was spelt eyen, which comes nearer to the Saxon eagan. 
Thus, in the description of the Monk — 

' His eyen stepe and roUyng in his hed.' 

In the northern dialect it appeared as ene. Thus in the 
Troy Book, 3821 : * 

' Grete ene and gray, with a grym loke.' 

Of another hero it is said, 3969 : 

' All the borders blake of his bright ene.' 

To this we might add the form shoon, for shoes, as being 
within the horizon of our reading if not of our speaking or 
writing. It is however extant in Scotch, as spoken. 

' We will not leaue one Lord, one Gentleman : 
Spare none, but such as go in clouted shooen.^ 

2 Hefiry VI. iv. 2. 178. 

Spenser hasy^;?^, meaningy^^j-. 

' Great Gormond, having with huge mightinesse 
Ireland subdewd, and therein fixt his throne, 
Like a swift Otter, fell through emptinesse, 
Shall overswim the sea, with many one 
Of his Norveyses, to assist the Britons fone.' 

Faerie Queene, iii. 3. 33. 

We have indeed other plurals in -en ; but they are younger 
than Saxon times. They are a proof of the power to which 
this form had arrived, and they indicate that, had not a 
stronger external influence interfered, the plural -en would 
have become as general in modern English, as it is in modern 
German. Such forms are brethren, children, housen (Glouces- 
tershire and Suifolk), hosen. The latter word is in our Bible, 
Daniel iii. 21. Mr. Barnes's Poems in the Dorset Dialect 
supply others, as cheesen, furzen. 

Of these, the first two, hretheren and children, are cumulate 
plurals. They have added the -en plural- form on to an elder 



S UBS TA NTIVES — FLEXION. 3 T 7 

plural ; for h'ether and childer were plurals of ' brother ' and 
' child/ The form sisieryn is likewise found, as ' bretheryn 
and sisteryn ^' The form sistren is said to be in full use in 
America, in the phraseology of the meeting-house, as the 
counterpart of brethren. Another kind of cumulation some- 
times takes place. The modern s gets added to the old n. 
In the passage just quoted from 2 Henry VI. the First and 
Second FoHos have shooen, the Third has shoon, and the 
Fourth has shoons ! With this may be classed the Norfolk 
boy-expression for birds' nests, which is hcds' nesens. 

It was by the French influence, leading the van of educa- 
tion for three centuries, that the plural in s, which held so 
small a place in Saxon grammar, became the all but universal 
law of English grammar. 

Other plural-forms deserve a word of notice. The plurals 
feet, geese, men, teeth, made by internal vowel-change from 
foot, goose, man, tooth, as strong verbs make their preterites ; 
the forms lice, mice, mere frenchified orthographies of the 
Saxon plurals lys (from singular lus^ and mys (from singular 
mus"), — are relics of an ancient class, never numerous within 
recorded- knowledge, but which has been reduced by the do- 
mination of the prevalent forms. Thus, cu (cow) once had its 
plural cy, a form which survives in the Scotch kye ; but with 
us it has been assimilated to the plurals in n, or else infected 
with the word swine, and has been converted into kine. 
So hoc had for its plural hec, but now it is hooks. We also 
meet with gayte in the transition period as a plural of goat 
{Pricke of Conscience, 6134), and geet (Camden Society's 
Political Songs). Here also we get the cumulate plural. 
Even if kine is not to be so regarded, yet certainly we have 



^ The Will of Dame jane Lady Barre, 1484, printed in A Memoir of the 
Manor of Bitton, by the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe, sometime Vicar of Bitton. 



3 1 8 THE NO UN- GR UP. 

in the Scottish dreeks a cumulate plural, wherein the modern 
s is imposed upon the old strong plural ; for in Saxon it was 
singular broc plural brec. 

There was a group of neuters, forming one of Rask's 
declensions, which formed its plural nominative and accu- 
sative without inflection. Such were kaf, ^mg, wif, word, 
and many others, of which the plural was the same as the 
singular; not as now, leaves^ things, wives, words. The 
feature has survived in two words, which are still of one 
form for singular and plaral, viz. sheep and deer. To these 
might be added swine, only that it seems now to be accepted 
only as a plural, while sow and the upstart word/z^, fill the 
office of the singular. 

Those words which we have adopted from Latin or Greek 
in the singular nominative unaltered, have usually been 
pluralised according to Greek and Latin grammar. Thus 
the plural of ' phenomenon ' is phenomena ; of ' oasis,' oases ; 
of ' terminus/ termini ; of ' iViXigM^^ fungi. But occasionally 
we see the plurals in English form, as when Dr. Badham 
entides his book, not ' Edible Fungi,' but Esculent Funguses, 
and uses this plural all through it, as 

' No country is perhaps richer in esculent Funguses than our own ; we 
have upwards of thirty species abounding in our woods.' — (p. xiii.) 

Some few of the nouns which we have admitted from 
Latin without alteration are not nouns in that language, 
and consequently have no Latin plurality. These we have 
pluralised with s, as items, ijtterests. 

On the subject of inflection there remains to be con- 
sidered the formation of the feminine noun. 

The ancient and native form of the noun feminine was in 
-en, as God, Deus ; gyden, dea ; ivealh, servus ; wylen, serva, 
ancilla ; ^egen, minister ; Jnmen, ministra. 

But this form has been supplanted by a French substitute. 



SUBSTANTIVES — FLEXION. 319 

and so nearly extinguished that it is difficult to find an 
extant specimen to serve for an illustration. Beyond sport- 
ing circles, not one person in a thousand is aware that vixen 
is the feminine oi/ox. In general speech it is only known 
as a stigma for the character of a shrewish woman. Yet 
this is the history of vixen ; and it is a very well preserved 
form, having enjoyed the shelter of a technical position. 
Not only is there the -en termination, but also the thinning 
of the masculine vowel, as in the Saxon examples above. So 
also in German fuc^g, fiid^ginn. 

Instead of this Saxon feminine, we now use the French 
termination -ess, as countess, duchess, empress, goddess, go- 
verness, laundress, marchioness, princess, sempstress ^. 

Governess is not invariably applicable as the feminine of 
governor. There are considerations which override gram- 
mar, as our practice of common prayer witnesses. Yet 
I remember to have heard ' Queen and Governess ' in 
church. But grammar has brought this class of cases under 
another rule which she has made, namely this, that the 
masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine. And 
on this ground it would have been quite admissible, majes- 
tatis causa, to have had founder in the following passage 
where we Tt2k,di/ou7idress. 

' The central plains of Australia, the untrodden jungles of Borneo, or the 
still vacant spaces in our maps of Africa, alone now on the globe's surface 
represent districts as unknown and mysterious as the north-east angle of 
Ireland in the reign of the great foundress of the modern British Empire.' — 
J. A. Froude, Reign of Elizabeth ; History, vol. x. p. 554. 

Of this feminine form some are found in books which 
are no longer in use. Dr. Trench has produced from 



^ Why the form sempstress is retained, in preference to the spelling seam- 
stress, reformed on etymological principles, it will belong to the last chapter 
to explain. 



320 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

writers of the seventeeth century the following : — buildress, 
captainess^ flatter ess, intrudress, soverazntess. — Some Deficiencies 
in our English Dictionaries, p. 19. 

The example of sempstress reminds us that there was a 
Saxon feminine termination estre, whereof a trace is still 
visible in that word between the root seam and the French 
termination -ess. This feminine is still extant in spi7iner, 
spinster. 

But we cannot recognise the termination -ster as being, or 
as having been at some time past, a feminine formative in 
every instance. Not only does the present use of such old 
words as Baxter, huckster, maltster, songster, Webster, and the 
more recent oldster, youngster, roadster, vc^2kQ it hard to prove 
them all feminine s, but even if we push our enquiries 
further back, we do not find the group clearly defined as 
such. There was in Anglo-Saxon hcEcere and bcBcistre, and 
yet Pharaoh's baker in Genesis xl. is bcBcistre. Grimm has 
conjectured that these nouns in -estre are all that is left of an 
older pair of declensions, whereof one was masculine in 
estra, the other feminine in -estre. This would explain the 
attachment of masculine functions to some of the group, 
which was clearing itself for a special purpose. In Dutch 
these forms are exclusively feminine. 

Concluding Observation. 

If from this point we cast a look back over the verbs 
and substantives, we perceive a certain quietude in the 
former, and a corresponding energy in the latter. In making 
this remark I am naturally taking as my standard of com- 
parison those languages with which the philological student 
is most likely to be equipped. The remark will hold good, 
as against the Latin language, still more so as against the 



ADJECTIVES. 321 

Greek, and most of all as against the Hebrew. In all of 
these languages, but especially in the latter, the mental 
activity of the nation is gathered up and concentrated in the 
verb. This is displayed by the immense superiority of the 
verb over the substantive in its attractive power of sym- 
phytism, and its expressive stores of variability. Time has 
been when this was partially true of our ancestral verb in the 
Gothic family. But it is no more so. It certainly is not so 
in our own insular branch. During the modern period, 
which dates from the fourteenth century, in which we have 
the movements of the language historically before us, it is 
equally remarkable on the one hand how little our verb has 
done to extend its compass, and on the other hand how 
much the substantive has done to increase its variability. 
The quotations of this section are a sufficient proof that 
some of the strongest lineaments of character in the English 
language are now and have long been finding their chosen 
seat of expression in our substantives. 



11. Of the Adjective. 

The adjective, or word fit for attachment, is a word which 
presupposes a substantive, and is for this reason essentially 
relative and secondary. This inward nature of adjectives 
is beautifully expressed in Greek and Latin by the outward 
conformation of their physical aspect. Whereas the bulk 
of the Latin substantives are in -us, or -a, or -um, and the 
bulk of the Greek substantives are in -o$-, or -r), or -ov, their 
adjectives are, for the most part, not in some one, but in all 
three of the forms, as becomes those whose business it is 
to agree with their consorts in gender, number, and case. 

Y 



^22> THE NOUN-GROUP. 

They are furnished with a threefold power of modification, 
in consideration of their dependent, relative, and secondary 
nature. Such is the adjective as against the substantive. 
Both are presentive words ; but the substantive is the 
primary, and the adjective is the secondary presentive word. 

But what is the adjective as against the verb ? It is plain 
that both of them are, as towards the substantive, secondary 
words. There is no verb without a subject ; and that subject 
is a substantive. The verb and adjective alike have their 
very nature based upon the pre-supposition of the sub- 
stantive. Therefore the verb and the adjective are both 
secondary words. And they differ only in the force and 
energy of their action. In the beginning of the last section 
verbs were compared to flame, while substantives were only 
inflammable stuff. We may fitly continue this metaphor, 
and say that adjectives are glowing embers. They not only 
give warmth, and tell of a flame that has been, but they also 
retain the power of future activity. If I say 'good man,' 
it is not asserted, but it is presented to thought that the 
man ^ is good.' If I say 4ive dog,' it is contemplated as 
predicable, though not predicated, that the dog ' lives.' And 
thus the adjective is nothing more nor less than a dormant 
verb — a verb in a state of quiescence. And by way of 
endeavouring to indicate the position which they both hold 
in the general economy of language, we will designate them 
as Secondary Presentives. 

We will begin our catalogue of English adjectives with 
a sample of those whose history belongs to an elder stage — 
those which were already ancient at the opening of the 
present era of our language. Such are : — dare, bright, dear, 
fair, fresh, full, good, great, hard, high, late, lief, light, like, 
long, much, new, nigh, old, quick, rathe, ripe, short, sick, small, 
sooth, strong, sweet, swift, true, whole, worth, young. 



ADJECTIVES. 323 

Next to these should naturally be placed the Saxon forma- 
tives, such as those in -/, -m, -n, -r, and -sh] those in -y, 
-ing, -ly, -some, -ed, -ward, -full, -less. 

In -1, -el, or -le : — idle, evil. Utile, middle, brittle, stickle 
( = steep, still used about Dartmoor, and entering into the 
word stickleback, and the local name Sticklepath, near Oak- 
hampton), tickle. 

A fine local example of brittle, in the form of brutel, occurs 
in a legend carved on an oak clothes-bat in the collection 
of the Rev. George Weare Braikenridge, of Christchurch, 
Clevedon. It appears to have been a wedding-gift, and 
altogether it is a remarkably interesting object, the more so 
as it is dated. The inscription is : — 

ROS. DAVESON. 1 664. IF . YOV . LOVE . ME . LEND . ME . NOT 
VNTO . A . SLLET . FOR . I . VERY . BRVTEL . WOOD. 

To these should be added bri?tdle ; for although we have 
cast it into other forms, as brinded (Milton), or the more 
common brindled, yet the pure word still lives in New 
England, where they talk of a ' brindle yearling,' or, as I 
believe it is spoken, ' brindle yerlin.' 

The fact is, we are no longer conscious that this termi- 
nation makes an adjective : it is no longer in productive 
operation. This is the reason why brindle has been con- 
verted into brindled, because all men know that the termi- 
nation -ed signifies the possession of a quaUty, but they do 
not know that -le has this signification. In the same manner 
we now say 7iew-fangled, but the original word is newfangil 
or new f angel, as in the Babees Book, p. 9, where the letter 
N is exempHfied by the following line of N-initials : — 

' To Noyous, ne to Nyce, ne to Newfangill.' 

(Not to be) too pressing, nor too fastidious, nor too new- 
fashioned. 

Y 2 



324 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

tide, tickle (above, p. 152). 

' So tide be the termes of mortall state,' 

The Faerie QiieeiiQ, iii. 4. 28. 

' The Earl of Murray standing in so tickle terms in Scotland.' — Earl of 
Pembroke, 1569 ; quoted by J. A. Froude, History of England, ix. 427. 

As brindle has been altered into hrindled, so tickle into 
ticklish. 

The old word wittol, '■ knowing/ which had a sinister 
meaning in Shakspeare's time, has been restored to com- 
parative innocence by Dr. Anster in his translation of 
Goethe's Faust: — 

' Unmannerly wittol 
Be quiet a little.' 

In -m. These have never been numerous within his- 
torical times. In Saxon there was earm = poor, and rum = 
wide, the former of which is extinct, and the latter altered 
to roo?ny. The only extant adjectives that I can quote in 
this class are grim, warm. 

There is a fine old poetic word hrim^ with much the same 
variety of meaning as the modern brave — 
' She was brim as any bear.' 

Prim is obscure : Richardson says it is short for primitive. 
I would rather believe it to be a northern form of hrim. 
Halliwell gives ' Prim, a neat pretty girl. Yorksh! 

Mim is perhaps worthy of mention : it means daintily shy. 
Out of these two vocables is made the jingling junto mim- 
miny primminy. 

In -n, or -en. Here we are much richer : even, oivn, open, 
fain, stern, heathen, wooden, tinnen, woollen, elmen, treen (made 
of tree, arboreus ; Spenser, Faerie Queene, i. 2. 39), leaden, 
hempen, threaden, oaten, olden, golden. 

This class of adjectives cannot be separated by any decisive 
line from the participial forms, such as drunken, shrunken, &c. 



ADJECTIVES. 325 

elmen. 

'When the ebnen tree leaf is as big as a farding, 
It 's time to sow kidney beans in the garding ; 
When the elmen tree leaf is as big as a penny, 
You must sow your beans if you mean to have eny.' 

Popular Rhyme. 



* A leaden acquiescence.' — Marvel, Doctor Johns, c. 22 (1866). 

wooden. 
' Wooden wals.' — Spenser, Faerie Queene, i. 2. 42. 

oaten. 

' Nought tooke I with me but mine oaten quill.' — Colin Clouts Come 
Home Againe, 194. 

Silvern, golden. 

' Speech is silvern, but silence is golden.' — Thomas Carlyle. 

Milton has the beautiful expressions coral-paven and 
azurn. 

hempen. 

' Slow ' are the steeds that through Germania's roads 
With hempen rein the slumbering post-boy goads.' 

Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, The Rovers, 1798. 

Tennyson has cedarn — 

' Right to the carven cedarn doors.' 

Recollections of the Arabian Nights. 

This formative has been partially supplanted by the Latin 
-ian. Thus our ancestors before the revival of letters 
never said Christian but ' Christen' : ' A Christen man/ &c. 

A magazine lately started by Blackheath School took the 
waggish name of The Blackheathen. Critics asked why not 
rather Blackheathian ? , The reply might justly be that the 
Latin formative to a pure English compound is incongruous. 
This is, in fact, only one of a multitude of little tokens that 
our language is sated with classicism. 



3^^ THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Of local names this form is found in Furzen Leaze, 
between Cirencester and Kemble. 

In -r or -er. Examples : — wicker, slipper (the elder form 
for the modern slippery). Slipper is still the common word 
in Devonshire, where they say, ' It 's very slipper along the 
roads to day.' A good illustration is afforded by the follow- 
ing line from Surrey, the Elizabethan poet : — 

' Slipper in sliding as is an eeles tail.' 

In -sh, or by disguise -eh, representing the Anglo-Saxon 
adjective in -isc. 

This may be called, more than any other particular form, 
the native adjective. It is the form of the adjective ' English ' 
itself, and generally of our adjectives by which we designate 
nationalities : — Welsh, Irish, Scottish, French, Dutch, Danish, 
Swedish, Spanish, Turkish, Flemish, Polish. In a few cases, 
however, we have admitted the Latin adjective -anus, as 
Roman, Italian, Russiaji, German. Here the Germans, 
truer to old habit, still say Oiomifc^, Statienifrf;, Oiuffifc^, 
©eutfc^. The antiquity of this form is sufficiently demon- 
strated by the fact that it is the prevalent ' gentile ' adjective 
with all the nations of our family. The Germans call them- 
selves 5)eut[cf), the Danes call themselves Dansk, the Nor- 
wegians call themselves Norsk, the Swedes call themselves 
Svensk. Besides the recognised nations, there is many an 
obscure community that asserts its gentility by setting up an 
-ish of its own. A friend, fresh from travel, writes that 
when he arrived at the Tyrolese valley which is called 
©roben ^()al, he asked whether they spoke Stalicnifd; or 
^eutfc^ there .? He was answered that they spoke ©robnerifd). 
And as an illustration how green and vigorous the form is 
in German to this day, we may observe it combining with 
some of the most modern classical innovations, and making 



ADJECTIVES. ^1"] 

adjectives like nteta:pt)orif(^, metaphorical ; meta^^^i)jtfc^, meta- 
physical ; met^obifc^, methodical; metonV)mtf^, ^ertow/itKos. 
In England the tide of classicality drove back this and many 
other forms. The Latin -an was the ready substitute for 
-ish. In 1535, Miles Coverdale, in Daniel i. 4, has ' and to 
lerne for to speake Caldeish ' — a form that will be sought 
in vain in our present Bible. 

elvisch = elf-like, uncanny, shy, 
at the close of the Prioress's Tale : — 

' He semeth elvisch by his countenaunce, 
For unto no wight doth he daliaunce.' 

churlish. 

' Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread, 
And force a churlish soil for scanty bread.' 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller. 

This termination is also put to adjectives, with a diluting 
effect, as longish, sweetish. 

In -y or -ey, representing the Saxon adjective in -ig, as 
mmtig, empty. 

Examples : — bloody, burly, corny (Chaucer, Milton), dainty 
(Spectator, 354), dirty, doughty, dusty, fatty, flighty, fusty, 
filthy, flowery, foody, gouty, haughty, heady, hearty, inky , jau7ity , 
leaf' (Mark xi. Contents), lusty, mealy, mighty, milky, misty, 
moody, murky, musty, Jtasty, noisy, oily, plashy, pretty, ready, 
reedy, rusty, saucy, silky, silly, speedy, steady, sturdy, sulky, 
trusty, weedy. 

The word silly has the appearance of belonging to another 
group, namely, those in -ly. But the Saxon scel-ig and the 
transition form seely were the precursors of the form silly, 
which appears as early as Spenser: — 

* She wist not, silly Mayd, what she did aile.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 2. 27. 



328 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

There has been a certain amount of assimilation from 
French forms, as hardy^ which is the French hardi. Espe- 
cially has this adjectival form been confused with the French 
in -if (Latin -ivus), as tardy, from French tardif ; jolly, from 
Old French jolif. In the case of caitiff, however, we have 
preserved this Frenchy very emphatically. 

Chaucer uses jolif ; but in Spenser it is jolly : — 

' The first of them by name Gardant^ hight, 
A jolly person and of comely vew.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. i. 45. 

Reversely also we find genuine members of this class 
written as if they belonged to French adjectives in -if. 
Thus we find in the texts of Chaucer the native word guilty 
written giltif and gultyf 

This formative is still in the highest state of activity. 
There is more freedom, for example, about making new 
adjectives in -y than in -ish. 
Illustrations : — 

corny. 
' Now have I dronk a draught of corny ale.' 

Canterbury Tales, 13871. 

foody. 
' Who brought them to the sable fleet from Ida's foody leas.' 

Chapman, Iliad, xi. 104. 

huttony. 

' That buttony boy sprang up and down from the box.' — Thackeray, 
Vanity Fair. 

plastery, ruhhishy. 

' St. Peter's disappoints me ; the stone of which it is made is a poor 
plastery material ; and indeed Rome in general might be called a rubbishy 
place.' — Arthur H. Clough. 

moody y unhappy. 

' Though moody, unhappy, and disappointed, he was a hard-working 
conscientious pastor among the poor people with whom his lot was cast.' — 
Anthony TroUope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. i. 



ADJECTIVES, 329 

saucy. 
' In that clear and saucy style which he knows how to manage.' — 
B. Disraeli. 

plashy. 
' All but yon widow'd, solitary thing, 
That feebly bends beside the plashy spring.' 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. 

An interesting adjective of a rather doubtful kind, but 
which seems to come under this class, is the ' incony Jew ' 
of Shakspeare. 

Pretty is from the same French word as proud, although 
its sense is not identical with proudie. That famous old 
French word prud, which forms part of the well-known 
prud'hommes, was one of the earliest of the French words 
that made themselves quite at home among us. Already 
in one of the later Saxon Chronicles prut is substituted for 
the native word ranc, as a fine word (I suppose) for a vulgar 
one. When prut was first naturahsed, it meant grand, 
splendid, proud, magnificent, insolent. From this prut, 
by our Saxon grammatical procedure, we made an abstract 
noun prit or pritte, which signified grandeur, splendour, 
pride, magnificence, insolence. The following lines are 
from a metrical life of St. Chad, in the Library of Corpus 
Christi College, Cambridge, MS. cxlv. : — 

' Al a vote he wende aboute * ne kepte he nan pritte ; 
Riche man J)ei he were imad * he tolde J)er of litte.' 

All afoot he went about, be kept no dignity; 

Rich man though he was made, small count thereof made he. 

This form is sometimes found in modern names of places, 
as Bushy Park. 
In -ing, as 

wilding. 

* O wilding rose, whom fancy thus endears, 
I bid your blossoms in my bonnet wave.' 

Sir Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake, Canto iv, init. 



330 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

' And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers.' 

Alfred Tennyson, Enid, p. 17. 

But this form is found mostly in combination with an /, 
which seems to imply that it was grafted on an adjective in 
-el, as darling, darkling, flailing, yearling. 

These words are now but little used as adjectives ; they 
have either got the substantive habit, as darling, yearling ; 
or the adverbial, as darkling, flailing, for examples of which 
see the next section. 

In -ly. In Saxon this formative was -lie, which was at 
the same time a noun, meaning body, as it still is in German, 
^etc^. The transition from the substantival sense of body to 
the symbolic expression of the idea of similarity, provokes a 
comparison with a transition in the Hebrew, from the word 
for bone (and body), which is '^'^V, to the pronominal sense of 
very or same. 

Examples : — cleanly, godly, goodly, likely, only, sieelly, un- 
mannerly, rascally. 

cleanly. 
' A cleanly housewife.' 

sieelly. 

'Steel through opposing plates the magnet draws, 
And steelly atoms culls from dust and straws.' — Crabbe. 

only. 

' The only prime minister mentioned in history whom his contemporaries 
reverenced as a saint.' — William Robertson, Charles V, Bk. I, a.d. 15 17. 

In the adjective likely we have the curious phenomenon 
of the altered form of a word coming to act as a formative 
to a better preserved form of itself; the first and last syl- 
lables of the word being originally the same word lie. 

This form has been the less used as an adjective in con- 
sequence of its general employment for adverbial purposes. 



ADJECTIVES, 331 

And often it happens when we come across it in our elder 
Hterature adjectively used, we need a moment's reflection to 
put us in the train of thought for understanding it. In the 
following beautiful passage from Chaucer's Boethius, the 
adjective wepely, in the sense of pathetic, would give most 
readers a check. The passage is here printed with its 
marginal summary, as a sample of the excellent way in 
which the editors of the Early English Text Society turn 
out their work. 

wepely. 

' Blisful is Jiat man ];at may seen J)e clere weile of good. ' Happy is he that 
blisful is he >at may vnbynde hym fro ])e bonde of heuy g'lp'lfyle ma^nthat 
ex\Q. % ])e poete of trace [Orphez/s] |)at somtyme hadde f,cm twrestrl^i 

. ' chains ! The Thra- 

ryjt greet sorowe for the deej» of hys v/ijf. aftir Jsat he cian poet, con- 
sumed with grief for 
hadde maked by hys wepely sonees be wodes meueable to the loss of his wife, 

-' -' -^ -' o J- sought relief from 

rennen. and hadde ymaked jje ryueres to stonden stille. ^"longg^Jrew'the" 
and maked ]>& hertys a7id hyndes to ioignen dredles hir romng rivers ceas^ed 

. J , , 111- J ,- \ to flow ; the savage 

Sides to cruel lyou^s to herkene his songe. (p. 100.) beasts becameheed- 

less of their prey.' 

In -some : — adventuresome, darksome, gladsome, handsome, 
irksome, wholesome, winsome. 

This is the German -gam, as langfatn. It looks in spelling 
as if this termination belonged to our pronoun so7ne, and so 
it has been interpreted by Dr. Wallis. (See Richardson, v. 
Handsome.) It is connected however with a different pro- 
noun, namely same. 

adventuresome. 

' And now at once, adventuresome, I send 
My herald thought into a wilderness.' 

John Keats, Endymion. 

darksome. 
' Darksome nicht comes down.' — Robert Burns. 

The word buxom belongs here. This might not be 



332 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

apparent at first sight. It does not look like one of the 
adjectives in -some; but it is so, being the analogue of the 
German BiegSam, ready to how or comply. 

' Great Neptune stoode amazed at their sight, 
Whiles on his broad rownd backe they softly slid, 
And eke him selfe mournd at their mournful plight. 
Yet wist not what their wailing meant ; yet did, 
For great compassion of their sorow, bid 
His mighty waters to them buxome bee.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 32. 

Hence unhuxum and unhuxumness signified ' disobedient ' 
and 'disobedience/ as in Handlyng Stnne, p. 250 (ed. Fur- 
nivall), ' pou art unbuxum.' 

Lissom is supposed to be short for lithesome. 

This formative is one that is in present activity. In Sir 
J. T. Coleridge's Memoir of Keble, p. 464, we find a new 
adjective on this model namely, long-some: — 'It is thought to 
labour under the fault of being long-some.' But perhaps 
we see here only an imitation of the German langfam. 

In -Q±\— ill-conditioned, landed, learned, leisured, moniedj 
wicked, wretched. 

weaponed. 

' & hee had beene weaponed as well as I, 
he had beene worth both thee & mee,' 

Eger and Grime, 1039. 

As we can draw no decisive line between participles in -en 
and adjectives in the same termination, so neither can we 
distinctly sever between adjectives and participles in -ed. 
There are many which everybody would call adjectives, and 
many which everybody would agree to call participles. The 
ground of distinction would generally turn upon this, — whe-^ 
ther they could or could not be derived from a verb. Yet 
this is not a very positive rule, because of course it is open 
to any grammarian to say the root must be a verb in order 



ADJECTIVES. '^'^'^ 

to have generated the form in -ed. Thus, for example, it is 
open to any one to maintain that patterned in the following 
quotation is a participle, and that it implies a verb to pattern. 
But to me it appears simpler to class it as an adjective in -ed, 
formed upon the noun pattern. 

' Professor Rawlinson tells us that, among the Persians, dresses were not 
often patterned, but depended generally for their effect on make and uniform 
colour only.' — William Ewart Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, p. 140. 

As to the word gifted in the next quotation, I would not 
undertake to pronounce whether it is the -ed participial or 
the -ed adjectival. 

' The gear that is gifted, it never 
Will last like the gear that is won,' Joanna Baillie. 

A different use and of another flavour is when we hear 
of a gifted or talented man — expressions both of them which 
savour a little of affectation. 

leisured. 

'Was it true that the legislative Chambers which were paid performed 
their duties more laboriously and conscientiously than the British House of 
Commons? It was admitted in other countries that that House stood at the 
head of the representative assemblies of the world. (Cheers.) What other 
assembly was there that attempted to transact such an amount of business ? 
(^Hear.) What assembly was there whose members sacrificed more of per- 
sonal convenience and of health in the discharge of its duties? (Hear.) 
The condition of this country was peculiar. There was a vast leisured class 
to which there was nothing parallel on the face of the earth.' — House of 
Commons, April 5, 1870. 

Associated with these in meaning was a form which we 
only mention to deplore. This is the old Saxon adjectival 
form -eht or -iht, as staniht, stony. Thus, in Cod. Dipt. 
620, ' ondlong broces on ^one stanihtan ford,' — along the 
brook to the stony ford. This form is preserved in German, 
as Bergid^t, hilly; bornic^t, thorny; ecfic^t, angular; grafi(^t, 
grassy ; fteinicf)t, stony ; and it makes one of the dainties of 
German poetry. 



334 ^-^-^ NOUN-GROUP. 

Unb ^an Bef^ii^t bie filBertvoUtc^ten ^eerben. 

And Pan protects the flocks with silvery fleeces. 

Wieland, Die Grazien, Bk. I. 

5lm Btumtd^tett (Se^:^ifen. 

Oti hloo7ny Cephissns. Id. Bk. V. 
j4«<i ros^s to wreathe in his goldilock hair. Id. Bk. VI. 

Grimm observes that in the written German this sid^t is 
much interchanged with A^^ while the popular speech has 
sometimes curtailed it to =et. These remarks, which may 
be seen in his 5)eutfcf^e ©rammatif, ii. 382, are of general 
interest to the philologer in regard to that blending of forms 
which is discovered in all great languages. 

In -ward, as downward, froward, homeward, inward, lee- 
ward, outward, toward, untoward, upward, wayward. 

There was also an old adjective lateward, as we learn from 
the following entry in Randle Cotgrave : ' Arrerailles. Late- 
ward seed.' — Didionarie of the French and English Tongues, 
1611. 

toward, untoward. 

' Which when his Palmer saw, he gan to feare 
His toward perill and untoward blame, 
Which by that new rencounter he should neare ; 
For death sate on the point of that enchanted speare.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. i. 9. 

wayward. 

' Our wayward intellect, the more we learn 
Of nature, overlooks her author more.' 

William Cowper, The Task, Bk. iii. 

leeward. 

' The vain distress-gun, from a leeward shore, 
Repeated — heard, and heard no more.' 

William Wordsworth, On the Power of Sound. 

In this vocable ivard we have to notice some very ap- 
preciable relics of an ancient verbal habit. It represents the 



ADJECTIVES. 335 

Saxon verb weor^an, to become. Not that it is derived 
therefrom, but is rather a branchlet of the same stock at an 
earlier stage. It has, even down to our time, retained traces 
of an old verbal power, so that it seems now and then to be 
equivalent not merely to the Latin preposition versus, but 
also to have the verb vertere in it, or at least the participle 
versus, -a, -tim. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus, xvi. lo, there 
is a passage where verti . . . versus might in old English 
have been rendered by the one EngUsh word ward. He 
is saying that he had changed his plans to avoid Antony : 
' I meant to have taken the Appian way direct for Rome. 
He would have overtaken me easily ! For they say he 's 
coming with Caesar's own speed. So I from Minturnae 
Arpinum-ward.' The last clause stands thus in the Latin : 
' Verti igitur me a Minturnis Arpinum versus.' I do not say 
that the translation here given is the best, nor will I even 
contend that it makes good epistolary prose, but it is some- 
thing like the use of ward which is about to be quoted. In 
Chaucer's Prologue, 396, it is said of the hardy shipman. 

' flFul manye a drau3t of weyn hadde he i drawe 
ffrom Burdeux ward, whil that the chapman slep.' 

Cambridge MS. 

That is to say, he had drawn many a draught of wine out of 
the sleeping chapman's casks, while on the voyage from 
Bordeaux. So that ward is equivalent to voyaging, or com- 
ing, or being on the voyage. 

Something of the same verbality will be perceived in the 
homeward of the following quotation from near the close of 
the Laureate's Elaine : 

' But when now the lords and dames 
And people, from the high door streaming, brake 
Disorderly, as homeward each, the Queen, 
Who mark'd Sir Lancelot where he moved apart. 
Drew near, and,' &c. 



^^6 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

We might go on to enumerate the adjectives in -full and 
-less, 2J& fruitful, thankful, fruitless, thankless, 

thoughtless. 
' Ah ! what a warning for a thoughtless man, 
Could field or grove, could any spot of earth. 
Shew to his eye an image of the pangs 
Which it hath witnessed ; render back an echo 
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!' 

William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Bk. VI. 

doughful = doughty, iii^iiQ. 

'The isle [of Man] is divided into " sheddings " (German Scheidungen, 
boundaries or separations). The judges are called " deemsters," that is, 
doomsters, or pronouncers of judgment. The title of the king is " our 
doughtful Lord." The place of proclaiming the law is the " Tinwald." ' — 
H. C. Robinson, Diary, 1833. 

But here we are already edging the border that separates 
our present subject from the adjectival compounds. We will 
therefore close the Saxon division with a mention of those 
adjectives which are formed by reduplication. Such are 
shilly-shally, ship-shape, wishy-washy, 

' A weak, wishy-washy man, who had hardly any mind of his own.' — 
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Bar set, ch. vii. 

Coming now to the French forms, the first that claims our 
notice is the greatly used -able -ible. 

Some of our commonest adjectives are of this type. 

Examples : — acceptable, accessible, accountable, appreciable, 
approachable, available, audible, comfortable, contemptible, de- 
sirable, estimable, forcible, irrepressible, justifiable, lamentable, 
manageable, marketable, notable, noticeable, peaceable, practicable, 
preferable, procurable, profitable, questionable, reasonable, re- 
markable, reputable, respectable, responsible, seasonable, tolerable, 
valuable, vulnerable. 

This form has much expanded in the last two centuries. 
Many of the adjectives of this type which are most familiar to 



ADJECTIVES. 337 

US do not occur in Shakspeare. He has neither approachable 
nor unapproachable, nor available, nor respectable. Although 
he has accept, acceptance, accepted, he has not acceptable. Nor 
has he accountable, although he has account, accountant, and 
accounted. He has responsive but not responsible. And 
although he has value, valued, valuing, and valueless, yet he 
has not valuable. When we consider the great copiousness 
of Shakspeare's diction, and his apparently unlimited com- 
mand of the English of his day, it seems almost equivalent 
to saying that these terms, so familiar now, had not then 
been coined. And if this be true only of some of them, we 
have here a strong mark of the progress of our language in 
a point which might elude general observation. 

peaceable. 

' He that is at peace in himself, will be peaceable to others, peaceable in 
his family, peaceable in the church, peaceable in the state.' — Richard Sibbes, 
SouVs Conflict, ch. ix 

conscionable = conscientious. 

' Not in a furious zeal for or against trivial circumstances, but in a con- 
scionable practising the substantial parts of religion.' — Isaac Barrow, The 
Pleasantness of Religion. 

This word is no longer used, but its negative unconscionable 

is still current. 

unsmotherable. 

' To the unsmotherable delight of all the porters and bystanders/ — Pick- 
wick Papers, ch. xxviii. 

colourable. 

' The wisard could no longer beare her bord, 
But, bursting forth in laughter, to her sayd : 
" Glauce, what needes this colourable word 
To cloke the cause that hath it selfe bewrayd ? " ' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 3. 19. 

' November 3, 1869. Vice- Chancellor Malins had before him to-day the 
case of Bradbury v. Beeton, in which Mr. Jessel, as counsel for Messrs. 
Bradbury and Evans, the proprietors of Punch, had asked for an injunction 
to restrain the defendant from publishing a penny weekly publication called 

Z 



^^S THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Punch a?id Judy, on the ground that it was a colourable imitation of Punch. 
The Vice-Chancellor refused the application on the ground that nobody of 
ordinary intelligence could be misled into confounding Punch with Punch 
and Judy.' 

personable. 

' A thousand thoughts she fashiond in her mind, 
And in her feigning fancie did pourtray 
Him such as fittest she for love could find, 
Wise, warlike, personable, courteous, and kind.* 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 5. 

acceptable. 

' So at my taking leave of him, hee put ten shillings in my hand, which 
came to me in an acceptable time.' — John Taylor (The Water Poet), Wa7i- 
dering to see the Wonders of the West, 1649. (Ashbee's Facsimile Reprints, 
p. 14.) 

amiable. 

' Of all the religious men I ever saw, he [Flaxman] is the most amiable. 
The utter absence of all polemical feehng — the disclaiming of all speculative 
opinion as an essential to salvation — the reference of faith to the affections, 
not the understanding, are points in which I most cordially concur with 
him ; earnestly wishing at the same time that I was in all respects like him.' 
H. C. Robinson, Diary, 1821. 

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this formative was 
pronounced in EngHsh as it still is in French, with the accent 
on the penultimate. We now say tmpldcdble, but Spenser 
sounded it implacable : — 

' I burne, I burne, I burne, then lowde he sayde, 
O how I burne with implacable fyre ! ' 

The Faerie Queene, ii. 6. 44. 

-ard is a form of which it is difficult to say whether its 
habit is more that of a substantive or of an adjective. 

lubbard. 

' Or if the garden with its many cares 
(All well repaid) demand him, he attends 
The welcome call, conscious how much the hand 
Of lubbard Labour needs his watchful eye.' 

William Cowper, The Garden. 



In -al (French -al and -el, Latin -alts). 



I 



ADJECTIVES. 339 

Examples : — accidental, carnal, confessional, diurnal, eter- 
nal, formal, habitual, influential, inquisitorial, intellectual, 
intelligential (Milton), intentional, martial, nuptial, parental, 
partial, sensual, suicidal. 

confessional 
(from the term ' confession/ as in ' Confession of Augsburg'), 

' Such was the sweetness and the goodness of Rothe's character, that 
while he lived, the sternest opponents of his school found it impossible to 
say anathema to him, and when they heard of his death, strict confessional 
theologians came forward and cast a flower upon the grave of the " pious 
Rothe." ' — Contemporary Review^ November, 1869. 

parental. 

' That, under cover of the Phoenician name, we can trace the chantiels 
through which the old parental East poured into the fertile soil of the 
Greek mind the seeds of civilisation.' — William Ewart Gladstone, Juventus 
Mundi, p. 129, 

inquisitorial. 

'We are not accustomed, as I believe the Wahabees are, to have the 
private life of the family subjected to an inquisitorial inspection.' — J. Gregory 
Smith, Education or Instruction! 1869, 

seasonal. 

' We know with what meaning the lily of the field looked up into his 
eye ; and if the robe of beauty on the earth was to him no dead product 
of the seasonal machine, but,' &c. — James Martineau, The Three Stages. 

matutinal. 

' And the patriots of the place, though they declaim on the matter over 
their evening pipes and gin-and-water, have not enough of matutinal zeal 
to carry out their purpose.' — Anthony Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton. 
ch. i. 

residual. 

' But the planetary orbits turned out to be not quite circular after all ; 
and grand as was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and 
Newton had to come after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be 
a little too circular ? What if species should offer residual phenomena, here 
and there, not exphcable by natural selection.' — T. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons. 

In -ie, after the French -ique. 

Examples : — angelic, apostolic, aquatic, artistic, domestic, 
z 2 



340 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

fantastic, gigantic, heroic, lethargic, majestic, narcotic, pedantic, 
rustic, specific, sulphuric, terrific, volcanic. 

These were from the Latin -icus, and this, probably, was 
from the Greek -ims ; but in tracing the philology of our own 
tongue, we are not so much concerned with the remote as 
with the immediate source. And although the question of 
French or Latin is at times a little embroiled, there can be 
no doubt that it was under French auspices and tutorship 
that we first acquired this formative. This point is set 
beyond doubt by the fact that we have another French 
formative of which this forms the basis. A more dubious 
point it oftentimes is to decide whether we ought to refer 
a given adjective to this French class, or to the Greek class 
in -ic, which will be noticed below. Where the stock of the 
word is un-Greek, we should class it here. But the reverse 
does not hold. A few purely Greek words belong here 
rather than below, as apostolic. In this case, history tells 
us that the word is older than the Greek inundation. In 
other cases, such as fantastic, although the word is Greek 
throughout, yet the spelling with f instead of ph seems to 
vindicate it for the French reign. 

Here too must be ranged those national and character- 
istical designations, Arabic, Bardic, Gaelic, Gallic, Gothic, 
Ptolemaic, Quixotic, Runic, Sardonic. 

In -ical, after the French. 

This formative is based upon the previous one. In both 
the languages, French and English, the cause of this cu- 
mulative form was probably the same. The adjectives in 
French -ique and English -ic ran with unusual celerity into 
substantival significations, as domestique, domestic; phy- 
sique, physic; logique, logic. Hence there was a further 
demand for an adjectival form which should be unequivocal. 
This seems to be the account of that strain of adjectives in 



ADJECTIVES. 341 

-teal, which is one of the notes of the literature of the seven- 
teenth century, and which has been largely discarded in 
recent times. 

dojnesHcal. 

' Dogs and such like domestical creatures.' — Richard Sibbes, SouVs 
Conflict, ch, x. 

Such discarded forms have an air of obsolete old-fashioned- 
ness about them, and it almost excites a surprise to find 
that after all we have been rather arbitrary in our discon- 
tinuance of them, as we have continued to use others whose 
case is nowise different. We familiarly use archcEological, 
logical, mathematical, mechanical, methodical, (Ecumenical, 
rhetorical, symmetrical, tropical, whimsical. 

Language is hardly ever perfectly systematic in its pro- 
ceedings. We must not find in this any drawback to the 
pleasure of contemplating its economy. Nor must we think 
that principle is absent, because it is not rigidly executed 
and carried out at all points, and because there is something 
arbitrary in the superficial appearance. s 

In -esque. Examples : — Barbaresque, gigantesque, gro- 
tesque, picturesque. 

' We only bow to a universal law, and recognise in the fondness of man 
for the barbaresque and the gigantesque the same instincts that make him 
appreciate the picturesque effects of nature and its grander displays.' — 
A Leading Article, Nov. 9, 1868. 

grotesque. 
' Withered, grotesque, immeasurably old,' 

William Wordsworth, Fish-women, 1820. 

New adjectives of this type are made every day. A. H. 
Clough took the liberty of thus adjectiving Lord Macaulay 
(in private correspondence) : — 

' I have only detected one error myself, but it is a very Macaulayesque 
one. He speaks of " the oaks of Magdalen " : they are elms. There was 



34^ THE NOUN-GROUP. 

no occasion to say anything but trees, but the temptation to say something 
particular was too strong.' 

Moreover, we sometimes see Dantesque, which may be 
regarded as an imitation of the Itahan, in which the adjec- 
tive Dantesco and also its adverb Dantescamente are quite 
estabhshed. And in truth this French form -esque came 
from the Italian -esco, and this again from the Gothic -isc 
which has become in German -if^. The Old High Dutch 
diutisc, which in modern German is 2)etit[d>, is in Italian 
Tedesco. So that this French -esque is radically the same as 
our Saxon -isc and English -ish, only having performed a 
tour through two Romanesque tongues, it has come round 
to us with a pecuHar complexion of its own,— an excellent 
specimen of the way in which the resources of language are 
enriched by mere variation. 

While we are touching Italian, we may notice (paren- 
thetically) an adjectival form which looks Italian, though we 
probably adopted it at first from the Spaniards. This is the 
form -ese, in certain national designations, as Cingalese, 
Chinese, Maltese, Portuguese, 

This orthography is rather Italian than Spanish. An 
Englishman is in Spanish called Ingles, but in Italian 
Inglese. At the time when our maritime expeditions and 
our politics brought us most into contact with Spaniards, 
our literary habits were more influenced by the Italian lan- 
guage than by the Spanish : and hence it is quite probable 
that this form may at first have been learnt of Spaniards 
and afterwards modified by an Italian orthography. 

Before we have quite done with our French adjectives, 
we ought to notice one which has filled a large space in the 
history of our language. This is the adjective quaint. It 
was already a great word in the transition period; it was 
an established word of old standing when Chaucer wrote, 



ADJECTIVES. 343 

and it still retains some vitality. A word so often met with 
in ages so widely distant, and bearing such a variety of sig- 
nification, merits a paragraph to itself. 

There have been at all periods of history certain prominent 
and favourite words — words of the day. By way of ready 
illustration, we might mention fine and elegant as favourite 
words of last century ; and nice and interesting as words that 
are repeated with great frequency in our own day. Such 
favourite words are generally adjectives. Such an adjective 
was quaint in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. 
In the old French it was written coint, choint, and it has been 
derived with great probability from the Latin comptus, neat, 
trim, orderly, handsome. At the time of the rise of King's 
English in the fourteenth century, this was a great social 
word describing an indefinite compass of merit and appro- 
bation. Whatever things were agreeable, elegant, clever, 
neat, trim, gracious, pretty, amiable, taking, affable, proper 
spruce, handsome, happy, knowing, dodgy, cunning, artful, 
gentle, prudent, wise, discreet (and all this is but a rough 
translation of Roquefort's equivalents for coint), were in- 
cluded under this comprehensive word. 

In Chaucer, the spear of Achilles, which can both heal 
and hurt; is called a ' quaint spear ' : — 

' And fell in speech of Telephus the king 
And of Achilles for his queinte spere, 
For he coude with it both hele and dere.' 

Canterbury Tales, 1 05 5 3. 

By the time we come to Spenser it has acquired a new 
sense, very naturally evolved from the possession of all the 
most esteemed social accomplishments; it has come to 
mean fastidious. Florimell, when she has taken refuge in 
the hut of the witch, is fain to accept her rude hospitalides : 

' And gan recomfort her in her rude wyse, 
With womanish compassion of her plaint, 



344 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

Wiping the teares from her suffused eyes, 
And bidding her sit downe, to rest her faint 
And wearie limbes awhile. She, nothing quaint 
Nor 'sdeignfuU of so homely fashion, 
1 Sith brought she was now to so hard constraint. 

Sate downe upon the dusty ground anon : 
As glad of that small rest as bird of tempest gon.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 7. lO. 

Another stage in our national history, and we come to 
the period at which the word has stuck fast ever since, and 
there rooted itself. We may almost say that the word quaint 
now signifies ' after the fashion of the seventeenth century/ 
or something to that effect. It means something that is 
pretty after some bygone standard of prettyness ; and if we 
trace back the time we shall find it in the seventeenth 
century. As the memory of man is in legal doctrine 
localised to the reign of Richard the Second, as ' Old 
English' is (or was, before there was an Early English Text 
Society, and before Mr. Freeman had arisen to assign a 
new meaning to the word English) particularly identified 
with the language of the fifteenth century, so quaintness of 
diction has acquired for itself a permanent place in the 
literature of the seventeenth. In the Edinburgh Review, 
January, 1842, is an article on Thomas Fuller, in the course 
of which are some excellent remarks bearing on the word 
now before us : — 

' In many respects Fuller may be considered the very type and exemplar 
of that large class of religious writers of the seventeenth century to which 
we emphatically apply the term " quaint." That word has long ceased to 
mean what it once meant. By derivation, and by original usage, it first 
signified " scrupulously elegant, refined, exact, accurate," beyond the reach 
of common art. In time it came to be applied to whatever was designed 
to indicate these characteristics — though excogitated with so elaborate a 
subtlety as to trespass on ease and nature. In a word, it was applied to 
what was ingenious and fantastic, rather than tasteful or beautiful. It is 
now wholly used in this acceptation ; and always implies some violation of 
the taste, some deviation from what the " natural " requires under the given 

circumstances Now the age in which Fuller lived was the 

golden age of " quaintness " of all kinds — in gardening, in architecture, 



ADJECTIVES. 345 

in costume, in manners, in religion, in literature. As men improved ex- 
ternal nature with a perverse expenditure of money and ingenuity — made 
her yews and cypresses grow into peacocks and statues, tortured and 
clipped her luxuriance into monotonous uniformity, turned her graceful 
curves and spirals into straight lines and parallelograms, compelled things 
incongruous to blend in artificial union, and then measured the merits of the 
work, not by the absurdity of the design, but by the difficulty of the 
execution, — so in literature, the curiously and elaborately unnatural was too 

often the sole object The constitution of Fuller's mind 

had such an affinity with the peculiarities of the day, that what was 
" quaint " in others seems to have been his natural element — the sort of 
attire in which his active and eccentric genius loved to clothe itself.' 

The word sometimes signifies merely a nicety in small 
things, as in the following : — 

' But how a body so fantastic, trim. 
And quaint in its deportment and attire, 
Can lodge a heavenly mind — demands a doubt.' 

William Cowper, The Time-Piece. 

Here we may bring our French list to an end, but not 
without the observation, which has been already made above 
under the substantive, that the line of division between our 
French and Latin groups is much blurred. The general 
case is this : We took the form from the French ; but the 
great bulk of the words that now constitute the group, have 
been derived to us from the Latin. And it may be added that 
many words seem now most easily traceable to the Latin, 
which we originally borrowed from the French. In the great 
latinising tyranny, many words were purged from the tinge 
of their originally French nationality, and reclaimed to a 
Latin standard. The delitahle of Chaucer and Piers Plowman 
had become delectahle long before Bunyan wrote of the De- 
lectable Mountains. 

When the learned of the nation were steeped in Latin, 
vast quantities of French words in our language had a new 
surface of Latin put upon them. And the Latin invasion 
did not stop here; many old Saxon forms were modified 
in a Latin sense. 



34<^ THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Our list of the Latin formatives begins with one which 
was erected upon a Saxon basis. This is the form in -ous, 
-eous, Latin -ius, or -osus. 

In adopting this form we seem to have been continuing 
and gradually modifying the Saxon adjectives in -wis. 
Thus rihiwis became righteous. 

Examples : — boisterous, covetous, dexterous, disastrous, 
erroneous, glorious, gracious, jealous, luxurious, meritorious, 
multitudinous (Shakspeare), necessitous, noxious, obstreperous, 
outrageous, pious, poisonous, riotous, tedious, zealous. 

joyous, courteous, gracious, spacious. 

'Long were it to describe the goodly frame, 
And stately port of Castle Joyeous, 
(For so that Castle hight by commun name) 
Where they were entertaynd with courteous 
And comely glee of many gratious 
Faire Ladies, and of many a gentle knight, 
Who, through a Chamber long and spacious, 
Eftsoones them brought unto their Ladies sight, 
That of them cleeped was the Lady of Delight.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii, I, 31. 

' And all . . . wondered at the gracious wordes, that proceeded out of his 
mouth.' — Luhe iv. 22. 

barbarous. 

' The Scythian counted the Athenian, whom he did not vnderstand, bar- 
barous : so the Romane did the Syrian, and the lew, (euen S. Hierome him- 
selfe calleth the Hebrew tongue barbarous, belike because it was strange 
to so many) so the Emperour of Comtantinople calleth the Latine tongue, 
barbarous, though Pope Nicolas do storme at it : so the lewes long before 
Christ, called all other nations, Log?iazim, which is little better than bar- 
barous.' — The Translators to the Reader, 161 1. 

rhizopodous. 
' Spongilla is a rhizopodous animal.' 

fastuous. 

' In reforming the lives of the clergy he was too fastuous and severe.* — 
Jeremy Taylor, ed, Eden, vol. v. p. 139. 



ADJECTIVES. 347 

slumbrous. 

' And awaken the slumbrous state of conscience in which too many of us 
habitually live.' — Sir J. T. Coleridge, Memoir of Keble, ch. xiv. 

erroneous. 

' Mr. said the right hon. gentleman who had just sat down had made 

statements which, from his experience, he would show to be entirely false. 
' The Speaker — The hon. member means to say erroneous. (A laugh.) 
' Mr. begged to apologise for using a word which was not Parlia- 
mentary, He had been but a short time in the House, and was therefore 
not well versed in Parliamentary terms (a laugh), but if there was any Par- 
liamentary term stronger than the word " erroneous," he would beg leave to 
use it with reference to some of the statements of the right hon. gentleman.' 
—House of Commons, June 17, 1870. 

stercoraceous. 

' The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,' 

William Cowper, The Garden. 

obstreperous. 

* Nor is it a mean praise of rural life 
And solitude, that they do favour most. 
Most frequently call forth, and best sustain. 
These pure sensations ; that can penetrate 
The obstreperous city; on the barren seas 
Are not unfelt.' 

William Wordsworth, The Exctirsion, Bk. IV. 

luxurious. 

' A free nation ought not to provoke war ; but it ought not to be too 
luxurious and ease-loving to fight, if the occasion should arise.' — Llewelyn 
Davies, The Gospel and Modern Life, p. 45. 

generous, conspicuous, illustrious. 

' As belonging to the old blood he had especially recommended himself to 
Elizabeth's favour by his loyalty, and in 1572 he had been rewarded for his 
services by the earldom of Essex. He was young, enthusiastic, generous ; the 
first conspicuous representative of that illustrious company who revived in 
the England of Elizabeth the genius of mediaeval chivalry. He was burning 
to deserve his honours ; and in Ireland ... he saw the opportunity which he 
desired.' — J. A. Froude, History of England, vol. x. p. 551. 

Bumptious was a slang Oxford adjective which started 
about 1 84 1. It is now sometimes seen in literature : 



348 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

• " Look at that comical sparrow," she said, " Look how he cocks his 
head first on one side and then on the other. Does he want us to see him ? 
Is he bumptious, or what ? " ' — George Macdonald, The Seaboard Parish, 
ch. xi. 

The next place seems due to another form of the Latin 
termination -osus. It is as markedly modern as the previous 
one is distinguished for its old standing in the language. 
It has an Italian tinge. This is the form in -ose. 

Examples : — bellicose, globose (Milton), gloriose, grandiose, 
operose, otiose, varicose. 

otiose, 

' We lay out of the case such stories of supernatural events as require on 
the part of the hearer nothing more than an otiose assent ; stories upon 
which nothing depends, in which no interest is involved, nothing is to be 
done or changed in consequence of believing them.' — Paley's Evidences. 

operose. 

' I heard Dr. Chalmers preach. It was a splendid discourse, against the 
Judaical observance of the Sabbath, which he termed " an expedient for 
pacifying the jealousies of a God of vengeance," — reprobating the operose 
drudgery of such Sabbaths. Many years afterwards, I mentioned this to 
Irving, who was then the colleague of Chalmers ; and he told me that the 
Deacons waited on the Doctor to remonstrate with him on the occasion of 
this sermon.' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, 182 1. 

In -ive, Latin -ivus. 

Examples : — active, aggregative, appreciative, associative, 
authoritative, comparative, conclusive, creative, detective, dis- 
tinctive, elective, exclusive, for getive (Shakspeare, 2 Henry IV, 
iv. 3), imaginative, inventive, motive, passive, pensive, positive, 
reflective, reparative, repulsive, responsive, retentive, sensitive, 
speculative, suggestive, superlative. 



' Grew like the Summer Grasse, fastest by Night, 
Vnseene yet cressiue in his facultie,' 

Shakspeare, Henry V, i. : 

persistive, 
' Persistive constancy.' — Troilus and Cressida, i. 3. 



ADJECTIVES, 349 

narrative. 
' Narrative old age.' — Alexander Pope. 

responsive. 
' The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung.' 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. 

represefitative. 

' Home Tooke having obtained a seat in the House of Commons as 
representative of the famous borough of Old Sarum.'— H, C. Robinson, 
Diary, 1801. , 

Speculative. 

' High on her speculative tower 
Stood Science waiting for the hour.' 

William Wordsworth, The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820. 

aggregative, associative, creative, motive. 

' Fancy is aggregative and associative — Imagination is creative, motive.' — 
John Brown, M.D., Horae Subsecivae. 

conclusive. 

' The admissions of an advocate are the most conclusive evidence.' — 
Bishop of St. David's, Charge, 1863. 

reparative. 

' The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted 
to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz. a reparative process.' — 
Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing. 

Appreciative has been a great word of late. Professor 
Lightfoot {St. Paul and Seneca) speaks of Sir A. Grant's 
' highly appreciative account of the Stoic school.' 

distinctive. 

' There was something so very distinctive in him, traits and tones to make 
an impression to be remembered all one's life.' — JohnKeble, Memoir, p. 452. 

In -ine, Latin -inus, -ineus. 
Examples : — divine, internecine, marine, sanguine. 
Our pronunciation of marine is decidedly French, and 
thus we are again reminded that our Latin hst is not purely 



S5^ THE NOUN- GROUP. 

and exclusively of direct Latin derival, but only preva- 
lently so. 

In -ary, Latin -arms. 

Examples : — contemporary, missionary, secondary^ sanitary, 
stationary, tertiary, visionary. 

petitionary. 

' Ros. Nay, I pre' thee now, with most petitionary vehemence, tell 
me who it is.' — As You Like It, in. 2. 

' Claspt hands and that petitionary grace 
Of sweet seventeen subdued me ere she spoke.' 

Alfred Tennyson, The Brook. 

This form occurs frequently in its substantival aspect. 

signatary. 

' All the Powers, signataries of the Treaty of 1856.' — Queens Speech, 
1867. 

contemporary. 

' Seneca was strictly a contemporary of St. Paul.' — Professor Lightfoot, 
St. Paul and Seneca. 

In -at cry, Latin -atorius. 

Examples : — commendatory, criminatory, derogatory, ex- 
culpatory, expiatory, migratory', nugatory, obligatory, pre- 
paratory, propitiatory, respiratory, supplicatory. 

criminatory. 

' And was taken with strongly criminatory papers in his possession.' 

In -ant and -ent, from the Latin participial terminations 
-ans, -antis ; -ens, -eniis. 

Examples : — blatant, constant, elegant, expedteftt, insolent, 
insolvent, jubilant, petulant, solvent. 

M-any of these forms are used substantively, as expedient, 
insolvent ; and, in one of its senses, 



ADJECTIVES. 351 

solvent. 

' And I say that the Resurrection is a fact ; attested by various and con- 
verging evidence ; defying the action of the critical solvents which unbelief 
applies to it ; and, let me add, reigning in the thought of every thinking 
Christian, as a vast evidential power.' — H. P. Liddon, at St. Paul's, Easter 
Day, 1869, 

Several of these are rather French than Latin, as the 
heraldic rampant. 

petulant. 

' The boys, when the periodical vacation drew near, growing petulant at 
the approach of liberty.' — Samuel Johnson, Life of Addhon. 

The word elegant merits a special notice. It is now 
comparatively little used: we have indeed the traditional 
combination Elegant Extracts; but almost the only new 
combination it has entered into in our day is in the dialect 
of the apothecary, who speaks of ' an elegant preparation.' 

In the last century however, and down to the close of the 
generation that overlived into this century, we had elegant in 
a variety of honoured positions. Scott spoke of Goethe as 
^ the elegant author of The Sorrows of Werther! 

In the very first sentence of Bishop Lowth's address To 
the King, which is prefixed to his Isaiah, this word comes in, 
thus : — 

' SIRE, 
An attempt to set in a just light the writings of the most sublime 
and elegant of the Prophets of the Old Testament,' &c. 

George Home (afterwards Bishop of Norwich), towards 
the close of last century published some sermons, and half 
apologising in his Preface said : — 

' This form of publication is generally supposed less advantageous at pre- 
sent than any other. But it may be questioned whether the supposition 
does justice to the age, when we consider only the respect which has so 
recently been paid to the sermons of the learned and elegant Dr. Blair. And 
greater respect cannot be paid them than they deserve.' 



^^'Z THE NOUN-GROUP. 

The form -lent, from the Latin -lentus, must be distin- 
guished from the foregoing. 

Examples : — corpulent, esculent, feculent, flatulent, fraud- 
ulent, opulent, somnolent, succulent, truculent, violent, virulent. 

Som.e adjectives in -ent, with an l of the root, have a false 
semblance of belonging here, as benevolent, equivalent, indolent, 
insolent, prevalent, malevolent. Here we seem almost over 
the border of English philology, but in dealing with such 
a borrowing language as ours it is not always easy to draw 
the boundary Kne. 

esculent. 

' The Chinese present a striking contrast with ourselves in the care which 

they bestow on their esculent vegetation A more general knowledge of 

the properties and capabilities of esculent plants would be an important 
branch of popular education.' — C. D. Badham, The Esculent Funguses of 
England, ed. F. Currey, p. xvi, 

-an, -ian, Latin -anus, -ianus, as African, Indian, Russian, 
Persian, Polynesia}!. 

This form acquired its importance in the first century of 
the Roman Empire. The soldiers who attached themselves 
to Julius Caesar in the civil wars were c2Medifuliani, and this 
grew to be the established formula for the expression of a 
body of supporters or followers. The friends of Otho were 
called Othoniani, those of Vitellius were Vitelliani; and in 
the same general period it was that ' the disciples were called 
Christians first at Antioch.' 

Robinsojiian. 
' William Wordsworth to H. C. Robinson. 

12th March, 182 1. 
My dear Friend, — You were very good in writing me so long a letter, 
and kind in your own Robinsonian way.' — H. C. Robinson, Diary. 

We will now proceed to the Greek forms. 

-ic, from the Greek -1K09. 

Examples : — academic, acoustic, CBsthetic, analytic, arctic. 



ADJECTIVES. 353 

antarctic, apathetic, apologetic, archaic, aromatic, athletic, 
atomic, authentic, barbaric (Milton), cathartic, despotic, ethic, 
gastric, graphic, telegraphic, theoretic. 

These are roughly distinguishable from those in -ic after 
the French -ique, by being entirely of Greek material. 
That class is more mixed. There is perhaps no form that 
more distinctly represents the influx of Greek, and its adop- 
tion into scientific terminology. A large part of these 
adjectives are shared by us with all the great languages 
of western Europe. 

authentic. 

' Methinks I see him — how his eye-balls rolled, 
Beneath his ample brow, in darkness paired, — 
But each instinct with spirit ; and the frame 
Of the whole countenance alive with thought, 
Fancy, and understanding ; while the voice 
Discoursed of natural or moral truth 
With eloquence, and such authentic power, 
That, in his presence, humbler knowledge stood 
Abashed, and tender pity overawed,' 

"William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Bk. VIL 

In -astie, -istic, -ustie, from the Greek -o-tiki]. 
Examples : — antagonistic, caustic, characteristic, drastic, 
patristic, plastic, pleonastic. 

Monast-ic belongs to the forms m-ic. 

characteristic (substantively). 

' The characteristic of that movement is that it seeks to attain its object 
by arguments bordering on menace.' 

Having said so much on adjectival forms, let us now 
endeavour to determine something of the natural quality of 
the adjective, and the practical effect of that natural quality 
upon our habitual conversation. An adjective is plainly of 
the nature of a predicate, as plainly as a substantive is of 
the nature of a subject. Now, to select a predicate for 
A a 



554 I'HE NOUN-GROVP. 

a subject is an act of judgment. It is manifest that judgment 
is more exercised in the utterance of adjectives than in that 
of substantives. I say horse from mere memory of my 
mother-tongue, and we hardly dignify it as an act of judg- 
ment if a man uses that word in the right place, and shows 
that he knows a horse when he sees it. But to say good 
horse, bad horse, sound horse, young horse, &c., is a matter of 
judgment. A child knows when he sees a garden, and we 
do not call it an act of judgment (except in technical logic) 
to exclaim There^s a garden. But to use garden adjectively, 
as when a person comes across a flower, and says it is a 
garden flower, this is an act of judgment which it takes 
a botanist to exercise safely. This being so, a speaker runs 
a greater chance of making a mistake, or of coming into 
collision with the judgments of others, in the use of ad- 
jectives. Partly from this cause, and partly also, perhaps, 
from the rarity of good and confident judgment, and partly 
it may also be from the modesty which social intercourse 
requires, we perceive this effect, that there is a shyness about 
the utterance of adjectives. Of original adjectives, I mean, 
such as can at all carry the air of being the speaker's own. 
And hence it has come about, that there is in each period or 
generation, one or more chartered social adjectives which 
may be used freely and safely. Such adjectives enjoy a sort 
of empire for the time in which they are current. Their 
meaning is more or less vague, and it is this quality which 
suits them for their office. But while it would be hard to 
define what such an adjective meant, it is nevertheless per- 
fectly well understood. Obvious examples of this sort of 
privileged adjective are the merry of the ballads, and iSi^fair 
and pretty of the Elizabethan period. In Mrs. Cowden 
Clarke's Concordance to Shakspeare, there are about seven 
hundred examples oi fair, without counting its derivatives 



ADJECTIVES. 355 

and compounds. Perhaps this perpetual recurrence of the 
word made a butt at it all the more amusing : — 

'King. All haile sweet Madame, and faire time of day. 
Qii. Faire in all Haile is fowle, as I conceiue. 
King. Construe my speeches better, if you may.' 

Loues Labour 's lost, v. 2. 340. 

Such was in the last century the adjective fine, and in 
a minor degree the adjective elegant. Of the latter we have 
already had some illustrations. Its companion is worthy of 
the like honour : — 

fine. 

' The truly philosophical language of my worthy and learned friend Mr. 
Harris, the author of Hermes, a work that will be read and admired as long 
as there is any taste for philosophy and fine writing in Britain.' — Lord Mon- 
boddo, Origin and Progress of Language, init. 

But none of these ever reached a greater, if so great, a 
vogue as the chartered adjective of our own and our fathers' 
generation, namely, the adjective nice. 

Should an essayist endeavour by description to convey the 
signification of this word in those peculiar social uses so 
familiar to all, he would find that he had undertaken a 
difficult task. It is applicable to the possession of any 
quality or qualities which enjoy the approbation of society 
under its present code. 

The word dates from the great French period, and at first 
meant ' fooHsh, absurd, ridiculous ' ; then in course of time it 
came to signify ' whimsical, fantastic, wanton, adroit ' ; and 
thence it slid into the meaning of ' subtle, deHcate, sensitive,' 
which landed it on the threshold of its modern social 
appKcation. Of this we have already a foretaste in Milton , — 

' A nice and subtle happiness I see 
Thou to thyself proposest in the choice 
Of thy associates.' Paradise Lost, viii. 399. 

A more special use is the following, and not the vague 
A a 2 



^^6 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

social use, yet bordering closely upon it. This sense, in 
which it is nearly equivalent to * fastidious,' has now but little 
currency, being crowded out by the social use. 

' But never was a Fight manag'd so hardily, and in such a surprizing Man- 
ner, as that which follow'd between Friday and the Bear, which gave us all 
(though at first we were surpriz'd and afraid for him) the greatest Diversion 
imaginable : As the Bear is a heavy, clumsy Creature, and does not gallop as 
the Wolf does, who is swift, and light ; so he has two particular Qualities, 
which generally are the Rule of his Actions ; First, as to Men, who are not 
his proper Prey ; I say, not his proper Prey ; because tho' I cannot say what 
excessive Hunger might do, which was now their Case, the Ground being all 
cover'd with Snow ; but as to Men he does not usually attempt them, unless 
they first attack him ; On the contrary, if you meet him in the Woods, if 
you don't meddle with him, he won't meddle with you ; but then you must 
take Care to be very civil to him, and give him the Road ; for he is a very 
nice Gentleman, he won't go a Step out of his Way for a Prince,' &c. — 
Robinson Crusoe. Edited after the Original Editions by J. W. Clark, M.A. 
p. 298, 

As far back as 1823, a young lady objected to Sydney Smith : 
' Oh, don't call me nice, Mr. Sydney ; people only say that 
when they can say nothing else.' This expostulation drew 
forth his Definition of a Nice Person, which may be seen in 
the Memoir of his Life, and which will serve to complete 
the case of this important little office-bearing adjective. 

Morphology of the Adjective. 

Let us close this section with some observations on the 
morphology of the adjective, or in other words, on the 
divers ways it has of dressing itself up to act its part on the 
stage of language. By ' adjective ' here is meant the pure 
mental conception, as opposed to the form. There are 
three ways in which the adjectival idea clothes itself and 
finds expression, which it may be convenient to call the 
three adjections. 

I. The first, which may be called the Flat, is by colloca- 
tion. Thus, brick and stone are substantives ; but mere posi- 
tion before another substantive turns them into adjectives, as, 



ADJECTIVES. 357 

brick wall, stone wall; and the latter, when regarded as a com- 
pound substantive, stone-wall, may again by collocation make 
a new adjective, as ' Stone-wall Jackson/ And a compound . 
noun of the other sort, that is to say, one with its adjection 
after it, as matter-of-fact, may become a flat adjective, thus, 
a matter-off act man. 

' He rather affects hostility to metaphysics and poetry ; " because," he says, 
" I am a mere matter-of-fact man." ' — H, C. Robinson, Diary, 1830. 

Thus we speak of garden flowers and hedge flowers : — 

' Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled. 
And still where many a garden flower grows wild.' 

Oliver Goldsmith, Deserted Village. 

In some instances we may see that a present adjective 
which is now nothing but an adjective, has been a sub- 
stantive at no very remote date. Thus 7mlch, in the ex- 
pressions ' milch cow/ ' milch goat/ &c., is a mere adjective, 
and yet it is nothing but a phonetic variety of the substantive 
milk, just as church and kirk are varieties of the same word. 
In the German language the current substantive for milk has 
the form of our present adjective, viz. Wi\i^. 

2. The second, which may be called the Flexional, is by 
modification of form either in the way of flexion, as heavey-is 
gate, or through a symphytic formative, as heavenly mansions. 
The latter, being the most prevalent of all modes of adjec- 
tion, has occupied to itself the whole name of Adjective. 

3. The third way, which may be called the Phrasal, is by 
means of a symbol-word, and most prominently by the 
preposition of. 

In the compound k?iighihood the word knight is (originally) 
an adjective, and afl"ords an instance of the adjective by col- 
location. We may express the same idea in this form, knight's 
rank, or thus, knightly rank, as in the second adjection. 



35^ THE NOUN-GROUP. 

The third adjection is when we say rank or quality of 
knight. This form of adjective we have learnt from the 
French ; and although we use it less than our neighbours, 
yet we are well acquainted with such expressions as men of 
property, men of learning, persons of strong opinions, the girl of 
the period, the men of this generation, arms of precision, &c. 

Our first quotation supplies three instances : — 

' Originally it was proposed that all the members (looo) of the Athenaeum 
should be men of letters, and authors, artists, or men of science — in a word, 
producers; but it was found impossible to form a club solely of such 
materials, and had it been possible, it would have been scarcely desirable. 
So the qualification was extended to lovers of literature,' &c. — H. C. Robin- 
son, Diary, 1824. 

In the following Yiuts, functions of a man is equivalent to 
human functions : — 

' I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, 
And exercise all functions of a man.' 

William Cowper, The Garden. 

Such are the three ways in which we manage the expres- 
sion of the adjectival idea, or, as we may conveniently style 
it, the three methods of adjection. 

The third or symbolic method, to which, as the one which 
most merits attention, the title of Adjection will be more 
particularly suitable, is generally effected by the preposition 
of, and yet not by this preposition only. Any other preposi- 
tion can discharge this function. Thus, if we take the pre- 
position beyond ; it is the same thing whether we speak of 
hope beyond the grave, or of deathless, or immortal hope. 

And it sometimes happens that through ellipse of the sub- 
stantive-adject, the symbol preposition may by itself fill the 
office of an adjective ; as in the local names of Bishopsgate 
Without and Bishopsgate Within. 

Of the three methods of adjection now described, the 
middle one, or the second variety of it, has so much the 



ADVERBS. 359 

greater development, that it has appropriated the name of 
Adjective to itself, and the body of this section has been 
occupied with it. 

This threefold variety of adjectival expression has a phi- 
lological importance which will more clearly be seen in 
the next section, where it will be made the basis of the 
arrangement. 



III. Of the Advekb, 

In Adverbs our attention shall be given to one leading 
character. It is that which has been already traced in the 
adjectives at the end of the last section. The adverbs rise 
stage above stage in a threefold gradation. They are either 
Flat, Flexional, or Phrasal ; and this division gives the plan 
of the present section. 

But before proceeding to exhibit these, it will be desirable 
to apprehend clearly what an adverb is, in the most pure 
and simple acceptation of the term. The adverb is the 
tertiary, or third presentive word. It has been shown above 
that the substantive is the primary, that the adjective and 
verb are co-ordinated as the secondary, and we now com- 
plete this trilogy of presentives by the addition of the adverb, 
which is the third and last of presentive words. Whatever 
material idea is imported into any sentence must be conveyed 
through one of these three orders of words. All the rest is 
mechanism. 

We assign to the adverb the third place, although we 
know that it does not stand in that order in every sentence. 
We do so because this is its true and natural order ; for it is 
in this order alone that the mind can make use of it as an 



360 THE NOUN'GROVP. 

adverb. Whether the adverb stand first, as in very fine 
child, or in the third place as in John rides well, either way 
it is equally third in mental order. K?,fine is dependent on 
child for its adjectival character, so very is dependent on the 
two for its adverbial character. There is a good meaning 
in very if I say ' a very child,' but it is no longer an adverbial 
meaning. 

As a further illustration of the tertiary character of the 
adverb, it may be noticed that it attaches only to adjectives 
and verbs, that is, to the two secondary words. The adverb 
is further removed from the base of language, it is higher 
above the foundation by which language is based in physical 
nature ; in other words, mind is more deeply engaged in its 
production than it is either in the case of the substantive or 
of the adjective. Accordingly the adverbs cannot be dis- 
posed of in a catalogue such as we have made of substantives 
and adjectives. The power of making adverbs is too un- 
hmited for us to catalogue them as things moulded and made. 
The adverb is to be looked at rather as a faculty than as 
a product, as a potential rather than as a material thing. 

Of all presentive words, the adverb has most sympathy 
with the verb. Indeed, this quality is already intimated in 
the very name of Adverb. It is the peculiar companion of 
the verb, as the adjective is of the substantive. It continues 
or intensifies the mental action raised by the verb, or even 
directs it into new channels. And here having reached as it 
were the third and topmost storey of our edifice, we leave 
behind us the care for raw material, and think more and 
more of the arts and graces of architectural composition. 
We have done with the forest and the quarry, and we are 
absorbed in the contemplation of the effect. We may yet 
incidentally notice that an adverbial form has come from 
Saxon or other external source ; but our main attention wili 



ADVERBS (flat). 36 1 

be required by a division as truly inward to the adverbs 
themselves, as that which formed the plan of the chapter on 
verbs. Moreover this internal division is the more worthy 
of consideration, as it is not limited to the adverbs alone, 
but is correlated to the general economy and progress of 
language. 

I. Of the Flat Adverb. 

The Flat Adverb is simply a substantive or an adjective 
placed in an adverbial position. The same word which, if it 
qualified a noun, would be called an adjective, being set to 
qualify an adjective or a verb is called an adverb. The use 
of the unaltered adjective as an adverb has a peculiar effect, 
which I know not how to describe better than by the epithet 
Flat. This effect is not equally appreciable in all instances 
of the thing; but it may perhaps be recognised in the 
following case of the adverb — 

villamous. 

' Like an ape, with forehead villainous low,' 

The uneasy young traveller in an American car, who (as 
Mr. Zincke relates) exclaimed ' Mother, fix me good,' gave 
us there an excellent example of this original adverb of 
nature. 

Although this adverbial use of good is not admitted in 
literary English, the analogous use of gut is polite German. 
Indeed, the fiat adverb is much more extensively used in 
German than in English, as fc^reiBeu (8ie langfam, 'write 
slowly.' We do also hear in English write slow, but it is 
rather rustic. 

Our English examples of this most primitive form of 
adverb will mostly be found in the colloquial and familiar 



^6% THE NOUN-GROUP. 

specimens of language. In such homely phraseology as 
walk fast, walk slow ; speak loud, speak low ; tell me true ; 
or again in this, yes, sure — we have examples of the flat 
adverb. We do indeed find stire thus used by good 
writers : — 

' And the work sure was very grateful to all men of devotion.' — Clarendon, 
History, i. § 198. 

clean. 

' SufFre yet a litle whyle, & ye vngodly shal be clene gone : thou shalt 
loke after his place, & he shal be awaye.' — Psalm xxxvii. 10. (Miles Cover- 
dale, 1535.) 

In the following, brisk is a flat adverb : — 

' He cherups brisk his ear-erecting steed.' 

William Cowper, The Task, Bk. III. 

strong. 

' Yet these each other's power so strong contest, 
' That either seems destructive of the rest.' 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller. 

In the following, warm is a flat adverb : — 

' Or when the deep green-mantl'd earth 
Warm cherish'd ev'iy flow'ret's birth, 
And joy and music pouring forth 

In ev'ry grove, 
I saw thee eye the gen'ral mirth 

With boundless love.' 

Robert Burns, The Vision. 

solemn. 

'And wear thou this, she solemn said. 
And bound the holly round my head : 
The polish'd leaves, and berries red 

Did rustling play ; 
And like a passing thought she fled 

In light away.' — Id. 

just. 

'A White Starling in Pembrokeshire. — Sir: On the 27th of October 
last, at about 10 a.m., I was seated in my room at Solva, Pembrokeshire — 



ADVERBS {FLAT). ^6^ 

a pretty little seaside town at which I was staying for a couple of months. 
A friend had just sent me a few back numbers of Land and Water, and I was 
at the above time and place reading in your issue of October the 9th a para- 
graph on " white starlings," signed C. P., in which the writer says that 
" whilst on a visit in Berkshire 1 saw a most beautiful specimen of a white 
starling. The closely packed plumage of that bird gave it a most lovely ap- 
pearance. He was snowy white, without a spot of colour. He dropped one 
morning with a flock in a meadow opposite our window; was also seen at 
Southstoke and Basildon, but afterwards disappeared, I fear, before some 
ruthless gun." I had only finished reading the paragraph when, with the 
paper still in hand, I stepped to the window, and outside, sure enough, there 
was a white starling in a flock of others ! I immediately ran to the house 
of my friend, Edward Robinson, Esq. — a rare ornithologist and taxidermist — 
and by the help of his breechloader we secured the prize.' — Land and Water, 
January 8, 1870. 

extraordinary. ^ 

' We had an extraordinary good run with the Tiverton hounds yesterday.' 
— Id. January 15, 1870. 



' I don't mean to hurt you, you poor little thing. 
And pussy-cat is not behind me ; 
So hop about pretty, and put down your wing, 
And pick up the crumbs, and don't mind me.' 

Ntirsery Rhymes. 

The adverbs have a knack of reverberation, which in 
flexional adverbs is a mere echo of sound, but in flat adverbs 
is often a varied reiteration of the sense. The following 
from Mr. Skrine's Translation of Schiller's Song 0/ the Bell^ 
furnishes an example : — 

back . . . home. 

' From girls the proud Boy bursts away, 
The outer world to roam. 
With pilgrim-staff pursues his way. 

Comes back a stranger home.' (p. 4.) 

Other examples of the flat adverb in the same work are : — 
true. 

' When strong with weak is blended right, 
And soft with firm doth well unite, 

Then ever rings the metal true.' (p- 5") 



364 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

slow, best. 

' While the bell is cooling slow 
May the workman rest : 
Each, as birds through bushes go, 
Do what likes him best.' (p. 14.) 

Of our short and homely adverbs there are some few 
which now bear the appearance of belonging to this group, 
having lapsed into it from the flexional group. Such are 
ill, still, which in Saxon are oblique cases, ille, stille (disyl- 
labic). But others are ancient substantives or adjectives 
whose original character has been overlaid by the adverbial 
habit. Such are 7Jifell,/ar, near, up, down, in, out. 

To this group belongs a word, provincial indeed, but 
which prevails through the eastern half of the island from 
Norfolk to Northumberland, namely the adverb geyn (Ger- 
man gegen), meaning 'near, handy, convenient.' Its use 
appears in the following dialogue taken from life : — 

' " Where 's the baby's bib, Lavina ? " 
" On the chair, m'm " 
" I don't see it anywhere here." 
" Well 'm ; I 'm sure I laid it geyn ! " ' 

The flat adverb is in fact rustic and poetic, and both for 
the same reason, namely, because it is archaic. Out of 
poetry it is for the most part an archaism, but it must not 
therefore be set down as a rare, or exceptional, or ca- 
pricious mode of expression. If judgment went by numbers, 
this would in fact be entided to the name of the English 
Adverb. To the bulk of the community the adverb in -ly is 
bookish, and is almost as unused as if it were French. The 
flat adverb is all but universal with the illiterate. But 
among literary persons it is hardly used (a few phrases 
excepted), unless with a humorous intention. This will be 
made plain by an instance of the use of the flat adverb in 



ADVERBS {FLEXIONAL). ^6^ 

correspondence. Charles Lamb, writing to H. C. Robinson, 



' Farewell ! till we can all meet comfortable.' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, 
1827. 

This flat and simple adverb suffices for primitive needs, but 
it soon fails to satisfy the demands of a progressive civilisa- 
tion. For an example of the kind of need that would arise 
for something more highly organised, we may resort to that 
frequent unriddler of philological problems, the Hebrew 
language. In Exodus xvi. 5 we read : ' It shall be twice as 
much as they gather dayly.' Instead of dayly the Hebrew 
has day day, that is, a flat adverb day repeated in order to 
produce the eff'ect of our day by day or daily. This affords 
us a glimpse of the sort of ancient contrivance which was 
the substitute of flexion before flexion existed, and out of 
which flexion took its rise. 

But for a purely English bridge to the next division we 
may produce one of the frequent instances in which a flat 
adverb is coupled with a flexional one, and of which it so 
happens that the example at this moment before us is 
Mr. Froude's assertion, that Queen Mary's letters 'were 
examined long and minutely by each and every of the lords 
who were present.' (Vol. ix. p. 347.) 



2 . 0/ the Flexional A dverb. 

When the flexional system of language had become 
established, and the nouns were declined, Nominative, Geni- 
tive, Dative, Ablative — the simplest way of applying a noun 
adverbially was by adding it to the sentence in its ablative or 
instrumental case. This was the general way of making 
adverbs in Greek and Latin, and also in Saxon. Of these 



0^)6 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

we have little left to show. The clearest and most perfect 
instance is that of the old-fashioned adverb tvhilom or 
whilome : — 

' It fortuned, (as fayre it then befell) 
Behynd his backe, unweeting where he stood, 
Of auncient time there was a springing Well, 
From which fast trickled forth a silver flood, 
Full of great vertues, and for med'cine good : 
Whylome, before that cursed Dragon got 
That happy land, and all with innocent blood 
Defyld those sacred waves, it rightly hot ^ 
The Well of Life ; ne yet his vertues had forgot,' 

The Faerie Queene, i. II. 29. 

The ablative plural of nouns in Saxon was in -um, as 
hwile, while, time ; hwilum, at whiles, at times. This 
ablative plural is the form which we retain in whilom, 
whilome. As this can only be illustrated from the elder 
form of our speech, we will quote one of the proverbs of 
our Saxon ancestors : ' Wea bi^ wundrum clibbor,' that is. 
Woe is wonderfully clinging. Here the idea of wonderfully 
is expressed by the dative plural of the noun wonder, and 
wufidrum signifies literally with wonders. 

To this place we must assign also o/te7t and seldom : as if 
oft-um and seld-um. The former is somewhat obscure ; but 
of the latter there is less doubt. The simple seld is very 
ancient, and does not appear in the Saxon remains, yet it 
crops up curiously enough in Chaucer's Knighfs Tale : — 

'Selde is the Friday all the weke ylike.' 

Canterbury Tales, 1 5 41. 

i.e. Rarely is the Friday like the rest of the week. 

To the flexional division belong the adverbs in -meal, 
though they have now lost their flexion. In Saxon they 



' =hight, i.e. was named. 



ADVERBS (FLEXIONAL). 367 

end in -vicElum, as sticcemcBlum, ' stitchmeal/ or stitch by 
stitch, meaning piece-meal (German (Stitcf = piece). 

Chaucer has stoundemele, meaning 'from hour to hour/ 
or ' from one moment to another/ Thus, in the Romaiint 
of the Rose, 1. 2304 : — 

' The life of love is full contraiie, 
Which stoundemele can oft varie.' 

and in Troilus and Creseide, Bk. v. 674 : — 

' And hardily, this wind that more and more 
Thus stoundemele encreaseth in my face.' 

flockmel. 

' Only that point his peple bare so sore, 
That flockmel on a day to him they went.' 

The Clerhe's Tale, init. 

In the Book of Curtesye, of the fifteenth century, the 
' childe ' is advised to read the writings of Gower and 
Chaucer and Occleve, and above all those of the immortal 
Lydgate ; for eloquence has been exhausted by these ; and 
it remains for their followers to get it only by imitation and 
extracting — by ca?tfelmele, by scraps, extracts, quotations : — 

' There can no man ther fames now disteyne : 
Thanbawmede toung and aureate sentence, 
Men gette hit nowe by cantelmele, and gleyne 
Here and there with besy diligence. 
And fayne wold riche the crafte of eloquence ; 
But be the glaynes is hit often sene. 
In whois feldis they glayned and have bene.' 
Oriel MS. ed. Furnival, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, iii. 

piecemeal. 

' And, when I would have smitten them, heard a voice 
" Doubt not, go forward ; if thou doubt, the beasts 
Will tear thee piecemeal." ' The Holy Grail. 

limb-meal. 
* Tear her limb-meal.* — Cymheline, ii. 4. 



368 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Here also I should range the adverbs in -mg or -h'ng, as 

groveling = xa/^a^f • 

' Like as the sacred Oxe that carelesse stands, 
With gilden homes and flowry girlonds crownd, 
Proud of his dying honor and deare bandes, 
Whiles th' altars fume with frankincense arownd, 
All suddeinly, with mortall stroke astownd, 
Doth groveling fall, and with his streaming gore 
Distaines the pillours and the holy grownd. 
And the faire flowres that decked him afore : 
So fell proud Marinall upon the pretious shore.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. 4. 17. 

flatling. 

' But it is worthy of memory, to see how the women of that Towne did 
ply themselues with their weapons, making a great Massacre upon our men, 
and murthered 500 of them in such speedie and furious sort as is wonder- 
full : wee needed not to haue feared their men at all, had not the women 
bin our greatest ouerthrow, at which time I my self was maister Gunner of 
the Admirals Gaily, yet chained greeuously, and beaten naked with a Turkish 
sword flatling, for not shooting where they would haue me, and where I 
could not shoote.' — Wehhe his trauailes, 1590 (Ashbee's Facsimile Reprint). 

darkling. 

' Then feed on Thoughts, that voluntary move 
Harmonious numbers ; as the wakeful Bird 
Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid 
Tunes her Nocturnal note.' 

John Milton, Paradise Lost, iii. 39. 

Instances of the gentive in -es, used as an adverbial sign, 
are upwards, towards, needs, eggelinges ( = edgewise, Chevelere 
Assigne, 305), eftsoones (Spenser, Faerie Queene, iii. 11. 38). 

needs. 

' Sen |50u hast lerned b}^ ])e sentence of plato J)at nedes ];e wordes moten 
ben conceyued to J)o Jiinges of whiche jjei speken.' — Boethius (Early English 
Text Society), p. 106. 

Translation. — Since thou hast learned by the sentence of Plato that the 
words must needs be conceived (fittingly) to the things of which they speak. 



ADVERBS (FLEXIONAL). 369 

Mark xiii. 7. 

Tyndale, 1526. 161 1. 

' When ye shall heare of warre ' And when yea shall heare of 

and tydinges oiF warre, be ye not warres, and rumors of warres, be yee 

troubled ; for they must nedes be, not troubled : For such things must 

butt the ende is nott yett.' needs be, but the end shall not be yet.' 

sonderlypes = severally. 

'Were he neuere of so hey parage, 
Wold he, ne wolde, J)at scholde he do, 
Olper J)e de]> schold he go to. 
"^ pus sonderlypes he dide J»em swer^, 

Tyl Argayl schulde J)ey fai]) here.* 

R. Brunne's Chronicle (Lambeth MS.) 3876. 
Early English Text Society. 

Upwards, 

' One's general impression of a mountain is that it should have something 
of a pyramidal form. The differentia of a mountain is, I suppose, that the 
curves of its outline should be concave upwards, whereas those of a hill are 
convex.' 

But the flexion which has obtained the greatest vogue is 
that in -ly ; as, ' I gave him sixpence willingly." 

This adverb might appear to be nothing but a collocative 
adaptation of the adjective in -ly to the adverbial use. Had 
this been its history, it would still have deserved a separate 
place from the flat adverbs, because of the almost universal 
appropriation of this adjectival form as an adverbial inflec- 
tion. But the fact is, that although the adjective and adverb 
in -ly have now the same external aspect, this is only a re- 
sult of that levelling process of the transition period under 
which so many of our flexions disappeared. In Saxon the 
adjective was in -lic^ as wonderlic, wonderful ; and the adverb 
in -lice, as wunderlice, wonderfully. And this final -e was the 
case-ending of the instrumental case, and so resembled the 
Latin adverb from the ablative, as verd. 

When we consider how much has been absorbed in this 
Bb 



370 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

adverbial termination, we can understand why the last syl- 
lable of the adverb in -ly was pronounced so full and long 
down to the sixteenth century, as in the following : — 

* Ye ought to be ashamed, 
Against me to be gramed ; 
And can tell no cause why, 
But that I wryte trulye.' 

Skelton, Colyn Clout. 

This adverbial form has become so exceedingly prevalent 
above all others, as almost to eclipse them and cause them 
to be forgotten : while, moreover, the great dominance of 
this form as an adverb has cast a sort of shadow over the 
adjective of the same form. Sometimes these functions come 
into an uncomfortable collision with one another ; as, ' Their 
ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed,' where 
the first ungodly is an adjective and the second an adverb. 
The expression ' truly and godly serve Thee ' is not quite 
free from the same disturbance. 

What was said in the last section about social adjectives, 
applies also to adverbs, though in a more superficial way. 
Adverbs do not take the root that adjectives do. In the last 
generation a marked social adverb was vastly : thus, in 
Mansfield Park^ when Edward was resolute that ' Fanny must 
have a horse,' we read : — 

' Mrs. N orris could not help thinking that some steady old thing might 
be found among the numbers belonging to the Park, that would do vastly 
well.' 

At the present moment it may be said that awfully is the 
adverb regnant. ' How do ? ' ' Awfully jolly, thanks.* 

Verily is an adverb in which a French base has received 
a Saxon formative. This adverb is a memorial of the bi- 
lingual period of our language. It has not undergone the 
usual process of formation through an adjective. There 
has never been an adjective verily : and I do not think the 



ADVERBS {FLEXION AL). 37 1 

adverb has been built upon very after its establishment as an 
English adjective; but rather that the termination -ly, as 
the established sign of adverbiality, has supplanted the 
French adverbial termination -meni. Verily is our insular 
substitute for the French vraiment, Italian veramente, Latin, 
or rather Roman, vera menie. It is curious to observe that 
the Romanesque languages should have taken the word for 
mind as the material out of which they have moulded a 
formula for the adverbial idea; while the Saxon equivalent 
has grown out of the word for lody ; lie being body, German 

chiefly. 

' Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 

Like seasoned timber, never gives ; 
But though the whole world turn to coal.' 

Then chiefly lives.' George Herbert. 

Before we pass from this, one of the most dominant forms 
of our language, we may glance for a moment at the feeling 
and moral effects with which it is associated. As the sub- 
stantive is the most necessary of words, so the adverb is 
naturally the most decorative and distinguishing. And as it 
is easiest to err in that part of your fabric which is least 
necessary, so a writer's skill or his incapacity comes out 
more in his adverbs than in his substantives or adjectives. 
It is no small matter in composition to make your adverbs 
appear as if they belonged to the statement, and not as mere 
arbitrary appendages. Hardly anything in speech gives 
greater satisfaction than when the right adverb is put in the 
right place. 

• Dickens, describing the conversation of two men at a funeral as they 
discuss the fate or prospects of various neighbours, past and present, says, 
with one of his happiest touches, that they spoke as if they themselves were 
" notoriously immortal." ' 

How happy is this ' notoriously ' ! how delicately does it 
expose that inveterate paradox of self-delusion whereby 
Bb 2 



'yjl THE NOUN-GROUP. 

men tacitly assume for themselves an exception from the 
operation of general laws ! How widely does this differ 
from the common tendency to be profuse in adverbs, which 
is a manifestation of the impotent desire to be effective at 
little cost. The following is not a strong example, but it 
will indicate what is meant : — 

' Most heartily do I recommend Mr. Beecher's sermons .... they 
are instructively and popularly philosophical, without being distractingly 
metaphysical.' — The Pulpit Analyst. 

As in art the further an artist goes in embellishment the . 
more he risks a miscarriage in effect, so it is in language. 
It is only the master's hand that can safely venture to lay on 
the adverbs thick. And yet their full capability only then 
comes out when they are employed with something like 
prodigality. When there is a well-ballasted paragraph, sohd 
in matter and earnest in manner, then, like the full sail of 
a well-found ship, the adverbs may be crowded with glad 
effect. In the following passage, how free from adverbs is 
the body of the paragraph; and when we come to where they 
are lavishly displayed at the end, we feel that the demon- 
stration is justified. If we quoted only the termination of 
this passage, the adverbs would lose their raison d'etre. 

* I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not 
mean by humiHty, doubt of his own power, or hesitation in speaking his 
opinions ; but a right understanding of the relation between what he can 
do and say, and the rest of the world's sayings and doings. All great men 
not only know their business, but usually know that they know it ; and are 
not only right in their main opinions, but they usually know that they are 
right in them ; only, they do not think much of themselves on that account. 
Arnolfo knows he can build a good dome at Florence ; Albert Durer writes 
calmly to one who had found fault with his work, " It cannot be better 
done ; " Sir Isaac Newton knows that he has worked out a problem or two 
that would have puzzled anybody else ; — only they do not expect their 
fellow-men therefore to fall down and worship them ; they have a curious 
under-sense of powerlessness, feeling that the greatness is not in them, but 
through them ; that they could not do or be anything else than God made 
. them. And they see something divine and God-made in every other man 
they meet, and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.' 



ADVERBS (phrasal). 373 

Unless it is used with skill and discretion, the cumulation 
of the formal adverb is apt to generate fulsomeness. Nay, 
even singly put, a certain moderation is requisite for a 
pleasing effect. In short, this form will not bear a very 
heavy charge, and when the weightiest demonstrations of 
this kind have to be made, it is found by experience that the 
requisite display of adverbiality is accomplished with another 
sort of instrument. 

As a bridge from this section to the next, the words from 
2 Cor. ix. 7, 'not grudgingly or of necessity,' will do very 
well. Or the following : — 

worthily and to great purpose. 

' Notwithstanding, though it [the Septuagint] was commended generally, 
yet it did not fully content the learned, no not of the lewes. For not long 
after Christ, Aquila fell in hand with a new Translation, and after him 
Tbeodotion, and after him Symmachus : yea, there was a fift and a sixt 
edition, the Authours wherof were not knowen. These with the Seuentie 
made vp the Hexapla, and were worthily and to great purpose compiled 
together by Origen' — The S'ranslators to the Reader, 161 1. 

Here we have an adverb of the formal kind coupled with 
one of the phrasal, to which we now proceed. 



3. 0/ the Phrasal Adverb. 

The Phrasal Adverb is already considerably developed, and 
it is still in course of development; but it attracts the less 
attention because the thing is going on under our eyes. As 
the general progress of our language involves the decay of 
flexion and the substitution of symbolic words in its place, 
so this alteration befalls particular groups of words more 
or less, in proportion to the degree of their elevation and 
consequent exposure. The substantive, which is the primary 
presentive, and which lies at the base of the rest, is naturally 



374 ^-^^ NOUN-GROUP. 

least affected ; while the adverb, which is the tertiary or top- 
most presentive, is naturally the most exposed to the 
innovations of symbolism. 

This expansion of the language seems to call for a cor- 
responding enlargement in the sense of such a term as 
' adverb.' If willingly is an adverb in the sentence ' I gave 
him sixpence willingly/ then what am I to call the phrase 
'with a good will/ if I thus express myself: 'I gave him 
sixpence with a good will ' .? In its relation to the mind 
this phrase occupies precisely the same place as that word ; 
and if a different name must be given on account of form 
only, our terminology will need an indefinite enlargement 
while it will have but a superficial signification. I would 
rather call them both adverbs, distinguishing them as Formal 
and Phrasal. Often we see that we are obliged to translate 
a formal Greek adverb by a phrasal English one, thus 

oixodvfxadov, in ActS ii. I, Wl'l/l one accord ; dTrepLa-n-daTas, I Cor. 
vii. 35, without distraction ; ddiaXelTrrcos, i Thess. v. 17, 
without ceasing. 

Of a child, in Mark ix. 21, is our rendering of naidioBev, 
an adverb of the formal and conventional type. 

Genitival forms of the adverb having ceased to grow in 
the language, their place is supplied by the formation of 
phrasal adverbs with the symbol q/"; as, of a truth, of neces- 
sity, of old. 

of old. 
' And all be vernal rapture as of old.' 

Christian Year, Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity. 

The symbol of has taken the place of the genitival flex- 
ion, and we may say generally, that in the modern action 
of the language the prepositions have taken the place 
of oblique cases. They enter freely into the formation 



ADVERBS (phrasal). ^y^ 

of phrases which do the office both of the adjective and of 
the adverb. 

As a word may be an adjective or an adverb according 
to its relative place in the sentence, so also there is many 
a phrase which, according to its position, is either an adjec- 
tive of the third class or an adverb of the third class ; that 
is to say, either a phrasal adjective (adjection), or a phrasal 
adverb (adverbiation). See how this acts, for example, in 
the phrases z'n Joke, in earnest. If we say ' he is in joke," 
or ' in earnest,' they are adjectives ; but if we say ' he said 
so in joke,' or * in earnest,' they are, adverbs. 

Here we have to do only with the adverbial office of such 
phrases. 

Examples : — at best, at intervals, at large, at least, at length, 
at most, at random, at worst ; in earnest, infad^ in good faith, 
in jest, in truth, in vain.. 

at present. 

' But at present we may accept these simple laws without going further 
back.' — Alfred Russel Wallace, Creation by Law. 

at last. 

■ ' So that one may scratch a thought half a dozen times, and get nothing 
at last but a faint sputter.' — James Russell Lowell, Fireside Travels, 1864, 
p. 163. 

in jest. 
' We will not touch upon him ev'n in jest.* 

Alfred Tennyson, Enid. 

In presence is a phrasal adverb which we have borrowed 
from the French, en presence ; as — 

' The only antagonist in presence . . . came to be treated as the only 
antagonist in existence.' 

The phrasal adverb in fact has of late been sometimes 
modified to in effect, after the French en effet. 



376 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

A phrasal adverb which has coalesced into one vocable, is 
that which is formed with the ^-prefix, as abed, afield, agog, 
aloud, afar, afoot, aright, awork. In our earlier printed 
literature, and down to the close of the sixteenth century, 
this adverb is printed as two vocables : — 

a right. 

' They turne them selues, but not a right, & are become as a broken bowe.' 
— Miles Coverdale, Hosea vii. i6. 

I derive this a from the French preposition a; thus afooi 
represents a pied. 

Another form of the phrasal adverb is where a noun is 
repeated with a preposition between, as wave after wave, 
bridge by bridge, &c. 

' And then the two 
Dropt to the cove, and watched the great sea fall, 
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, 
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep 
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged 
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.' 

Alfred Tennyson, The Coming of Arthur. 

' Not to be crost, save that some ancient king 
Had built a way, where, link'd with many a bridge, 
A thousand piers ran into the great Sea, 
And Galahad fled along them bridge by bridge.' Id. 

Another form of this adverb is that which is inducted by 
the demonstrative pronoun, or the definite article, or any 
other word of a pronominal nature. Such are, in the follow- 
ing quotations, the adverbs that time, no thynge, the while, 
the right way, the wrong way. Tt makes no difference whe- 
ther a preposition be understood, as if those phrases were 
abbreviations for ' at that time,' ' in no respect,' * for the 
while,' ' in the right way,' ' in the wrong way.' Such a con- 
sideration makes no difference in regard to the adverbial 
nature of the phrases, and has, in fact, no place here. 



ADVERBS {phrasal). ' ' 377 

/ha^ time, 7io thynge. 

' Irlond ]?at tyme was bygged no ]>ynge 
WyJ) hous ne toun, ne man wonynge.' 

R. Brunne's Chronicle (Lambeth MS.) 

Translation. — Ireland at that time was not-at-all built with house nor 
town, nor man resident. 

the right way, the wrong way. 

' The right thing beUeved the right way must inevitably produce the 
perfect life. Either, then, the civilised world believes the wrong thing, or it 
believes the right thing the wrong way.' — Laurence Oliphant, Piccadilly, 
(1870), p. 274. 

the while. 

' Yet, while they use greater earnestness of entreaty than their Lord, 
they must not forget His dignity the while who sends them.' — J. H. 
Newman, vol. i. serm. xxiii. 

Room enough must be given to the term ' adverb ' to let it 
take in all that appertains to the description of the con- 
ditions and circumstances attendant upon the statement 
contained in the sentence. If I say, ' I gave him sixpence 
with a good will/ and if the phrase ' with a good will ' is 
admitted to a place among adverbs, then there is no reason 
to exclude any circumstantial adjunct, such as, with a green 
purse, or without any purse to keep it in. If any one objects 
to this as too vague a relaxation of our terminology, I would 
propose that for such extended phraseological adverbs we 
adopt the title of Adverbiation. Such a term would furnish 
an appropriate description for the relative position of a very 
important element in modern diction. At the close of the 
following quotation we see a couple of phrases linked to- 
gether, which would come under this designation : — 

' I had a very gracious reception from the Queen and the Prince Consort, 
and a large party of distinguished visitors. The affability and grace of 
these exalted personages made a deep impression on me. It might be copied 
by some of our grocers and muffin-bakers to their great improvement, and 
to the comfort of others surrounding them.' — The Public Life of W. F. 
Wallett, the Queen's Jester, 1870. 



3; 8 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

Without effort and without thought. 

'When I contemplate natural knowledge squandering such gifts among 
men, the only appropriate comparison I can find for her is, to liken her to 
such a peasant woman as one sees in the Alps, striding ever upward, heavily 
burdened and with mind bent only on her home ; but yet, without effort and 
without thought, knitting for her children.' — T. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons. 

If the study of grammar is ever to grapple with the facts 
of language, one of two things must take place : either we 
must make a great addition to the terminology, or we must 
invest the present terms with a more comprehensive mean- 
ing. If the ancient terms of grammar were the result of 
mature and philosophical thought, and if they at all reflected 
those mental phases which must necessarily underlie all 
highly organized speech, then they will naturally and without 
suffering any violence bear continual extension, so as still to 
cover the phenomena of language under the greatly altered 
conditions of its modern development. A multiplication of 
terms is not in itself a desirable thing in any method ; and 
least of all in one that holds a prominent place in educational 
studies. 

One of the best tests of the soundness of a system hinges 
on this — Whether it will explain new facts without providing 
itself with new definitions and new categories. The multi- 
plication of names and classes and groups is for the most 
part not an explanation at all, but only an evasion of the 
difficulty which has to be explained. We have, then, ex- 
plained a new phenomenon, when we have shewn that it 
naturally belongs to or branches out of some part of the old 
and familiar doctrine. As therefore it is the condemnation 
of any system that it should be frequently resorting to new 
devices, so it is the greatest recommendation when it appears 
to be ever stretching out the hand of welcome to admit and 
assign a niche to each newly observed phenomenon. 

These remarks are suggested by the stage at which 



ADVERBS (phrasal). 379 

we are now arrived in our delineation of the phrasal adverb. 
For here we perceive that an opportunity oifers itself to 
explain philologcally one of the most peculiar of the phe- 
nomena of the English language. That which we call the 
English infinitive verb, such as /o live, to die, is quite a 
modern thing, and is characteristic of English as opposed 
to Saxon. The question, in presence of such a new phe- 
nomenon, is naturally raised,— Whence this form of the 
infinitive verb } We did not borrow it, for it is not French 
or Latin ; we did not inherit it, for it is not Saxon ! How 
did it rise, and what gave occasion to it 1 

This question is one that enters into the very interior 
growth of language, and one that will supply the student of 
English with an aim for his observations in perusing our 
earlier literature. I have indeed my own answer ready ; but 
I wish it distinctly to be understood that it is to the question 
rather than to the answer that I direct attention, and that in 
propounding this and other \ roblems for his solution, I con- 
sider myself to be rendering him the best philological service 
in my power. 

My answer is, that it first existed as a phrasal adverb ; that 
it was a method of attaching one verb on to another in an 
adverbial manner, and that in process of time it detached 
itself and assumed an independent position. As the fruit 
of the pine-apple is not the termination of a branch, but the 
plant continues to push itself forward through the fruit and 
beyond it, so it is with language. The sentence is the 
mature product of language, but out of the extremity of 
sentences there shoot forth germs for the propagation of 
new sentences and the projection of new forms of speech. 
Let me add an illustration or two. 

In the Saxon Chronicle of Peterborough, anno 1085, we 
read : ' Hit is sceame to tellanne, ac hit ne thuhte him nan 



380 THE NOUN-GROUP, 

sceame to donne ' — ' It is a shame to tell, but it seemed not 
to him any shame to do/ The Saxon infinitives of the verbs 
do and tell were don and tellan ; but here these infinitives are 
treated as if they were substantives, and put in the oblique 
case with the preposition to, by means of which these verbs 
are attached adverbially to their respective sentences, which 
are complete sentences already without these adjuncts. We 
must not confuse this case with the modern construction 
' to speak of it is shameful,' where the verb is now detached, 
and formed into the modern infinitive, and put as the subject 
of the sentence. These verbs to tellanne and to donne I call 
phrasal adverbs ; even as in the modern sentence, ' He has 
three shillings a week to live on,' I call to live on a phrasal 
adverb. 

In modern English this adverbial use is eclipsed to our 
eyes by the far greater frequency of the substantival or in- 
finitive use ; but still it is not hard to find instances of the 
former, and there are two in the close of the following 
paragraph. Mr. Sargent, pleading for colonies and emi- 
gration, says : — 

' We are told also that those who go are the best, the backbone of the 
nation ; that the resolute and enterprising go abroad, leaving the timid and 
apathetic at home. This is not the whole truth. If I look around among 
young men of my acquaintance, I see many who are worthy of all respect, 
but who cannot settle down to a fixed town employment ; who long for 
movement, air, sunshine, and storm, and who are impatient under the mo- 
notonous restraints of everyday occupations. These are the men for volun- 
teer fire brigades, and, in case of war, for fighting ; but they are not the back- 
bone of the nation in times of peace. Emigration, employment in India, a 
mission to the end of the world, form their natural resources. In sending 
them away, we get rid of an explosive material, dangerous in quiet times : 
we apply the material to a useful purpose, on the plains of Australia, or up 
the country in India. In one sense these are our best men : they are the 
best to go, not the best to stay.* — Essays by Members of the Birmingham 
Speculative Club, p, 26. 

As in French the phrase afaire (occurring often in such 
connection as quelque chose afaire, heaucoiip afaire, ' some- 



NUMERALS. 381 

thing to do/ ' a great deal to do ') became at length one 
vocable, and that a substantive, affaire (English affair), so like- 
wise in provincial English did to-do become a substantive, as 
in the Devonshire exclamation, ' Here 's a pretty to-do !' In 
place of this to-do the King's English accepted a composition 
part French, part English, and hence the substantive ado. 

If it be admitted that affair and ado are now separate sub- 
stantives formed from a preposition and a verb, the strange- 
ness of supposing a similar origin for our formal English 
infinitive is much lessened. 

This explanation may be confirmed or corrected by the 
young philologer ; only he should consider in what way the 
infinitives may appear to have been formed in other, languages. 
It might be worth while to trace the origin of the Danish 
infinitive, which Hke ours is phrasal ; he should also cast a 
glance at the flexional infinitives of the Greek and Latin, and 
see what sort of an account has been rendered of these by 
the Sanskrit scholars. 



The Numeeals. 

The numerals make a little noun-group by themselves, 
and are (like the chief noun-group) distinguished by the 
threefold character of substantive, adjective, and adverb. 

The distinction between substantive and adjective is not 
quite so sharp here as in other presentive words. It is 
however plain that the cardinals when used arithmetically 
are substantives, as in two and two make four. 

The numeral has also this aspect when any person or 
thing is designated as number one, number two, &c., the 
word 'number' being in the nature of a mere prefix, as is felt 
when we look at the oblique-cased Latin word which the 
French use in this connection. 



382 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

' " En Angleterre," said a cynical Dutch diplomatist, " numero deux va 
chez numero un, pour s 'en glorifier aupres de numero trois." ' — Laurence 
Oliphant, Piccadilly, Part v. 

Moreover, when the numeral takes a plural form, it must 
be regarded as a substantive, e.g. 

' There are hundreds of genuine letters of Mary Queen of Scots still 
extant.' — John Hosack, Mary Queen of Scots and ber Accusers, p. 198. 

There is in some languages an abstract substantive which 
is formed upon cardinals, and it has a peculiar utility in ex- 
pressing the more conventional quantities or round numbers. 
Thus in French there is huitaine, a quantity of eight, which 
is only used in talking of the huit jours, ' eight days ' of the 
week. So they have their dixaine, douzaine, quinzaine, ving- 
iaine, hentaine, quarantaine, cinquantaine, soixantaine, centaine. 
Of all this we have nothing. Only we have borrowed their 
word for 'a tale of twelve,' and have angUcised it into 
dozen. Then we have a native substitute for vingtaine, not 
originally a numeral at all, but a word that practically fills 
the place of one. This is the word score, an elongate form 
of scar, meaning a notch on the rind of a stick or some such 
ledger. Our special use of this word seems to indicate that in 
the rude reckoning of our ancestors a larger notch was made 
at every twenty. The following is from The Mystery of 
Edwin Drood, within a little of its abrupt termination : — 

' " I like," says Mr. Datchery, " the old tavern way of keeping scores. 
Illegible, except to the scorer . . . Hum ; ha ! A very small score this ; a 
very poor score !" 

He sighs over the contemplation of its poverty, takes a bit of chalk from 
one of the cupboard-shelves, and pauses with it in his hand, uncertain what 
addition to make to the account. 

" I think a moderate stroke," he concludes, " is all I am justified in scoring 
up ; " so, suits the action to the word, closes the cupboard, and goes to bed.' 

When used numerically, as two stars, three graces, four seas, 
five senses, then the numerals are assimilated to adjectives. 

But while we trace in the variations of the numeral a 
broad and general resemblance to the distinctions which 



I 



NUMERALS. 383 

mark the nounal group, we should just notice that there is 
not in thought the same adjectival character in the numeral 
as there is in the nounal group. If I say bright stars, 
fabled graces, uncertain seas, receptive senses, these adjec- 
tives have the same relation to their substantives, whether 
those substantives be taken in the plural or in the singular. 
Whereas the numerals two, three, four, five, belong to their 
substantives only conjointly and not severally. It may 
have been a dim sense of this difference that caused the 
vacillation w^hich has appeared in language about the ad- 
jectival declension of numerals. In Saxon the first three 
numerals were declined. Thus, preora is genitive oi preo : 
' pis is ])3era Jjreora hida land gemsere,' &c. ' This is the 
land-meer of the three hides,' &c. (a.d. 974.) 

Adverbial numerals are such as once, twice, thrice, four 
times, &c., where it is to be observed that the difference of 
adverbial form between the first three numerals and their 
successors is of a piece with the fact that these three were 
declined, and the others were not, at least not within recorded 
memory. The adverbs once, twice, thrice, are in fact old 
genitives which have been disfigured by a frenchified ortho- 
graphy. In the Ormulum they are spelt thus : aness, twiyss, 
thriyss. 

This group is exceedingly retentive of antiquity. Not 
only is there a radical identity in the numerals of the Gothic 
family, but these again are identical with the numerals of 
other families of languages. This indicates a very high an- 
tiquity. It will be as well to illustrate this fact by com- 
parative tables. First, we will compare the different forms 
assumed by the numerals in some of the various branches 
of our own Gothic family, and then we will pass beyond that 
limit and take into our comparison some of the most illus- 
trious languages of the Indo-European stock. 













^ ^ 















ffi 






,£3 +j +J +J 



bo 









NUMERALS. 



385 



In consequence of the luxuriant declension of the nu- 
merals in Sanskrit, I have followed the authority of Bopp's 
Grammar for the ' theme ' in each case, that is to say, the 
part of the word which is present or implied in each of the 
various forms under w^hich it appears in literature. 



Ianskrit. 


Greek. 


Latin. 


Lithuanian. 


eka 


hen 


un 




dva 


du 


du 




tri 


tri 


tri 


tri 


chatur 


tessar 


quatuor 




panchan 


petite 


quinqme 


penki 


shash 


hex 


sex 


szeszi 


saptan 


hepta 


septem 


septyni 


ashtan 


okto 


octo 


asztuni 


navan 


ennea 


novem 


dewyni 


dasan 


deka 


decern 


deszimt 


■ekadasan 


hendeka 


undecim 




dvadasan 


dodeka 


duodecim 




trayodasan 


triskaideka 


tredecim 




chaturdasaa 


tessareskaideka 


quatuordecim 




unavinsati 




undevinginti 




vinsati 


eikosi 


viginti 




trinsat 


triakonta 


triginta 




chatvarinsat 


tesserakonta 


quadraginta 




panchasat 


pentekonta 


quinquaginta 




shashti 


hexakonta 


sexaginta 




saptati 


hebdomekonta 


septuaginta 




asiti 


ogdoekonta 


octoginta 




navati 


enenekonta 


nonaginta 




satam 


hekaton 


centum 





The numerals have been inserted in this place as a sort 
of appendix to the nounal group, because of the manifest 
affinity of their form and their use to that group. At the 
same time enough has been said to indicate that they have 
a distinct character of their own, and that it would be un- 
philological to let them be absorbed into any class of words 
whatever. Their assimilation to the nounal group is less 
now than it was in ancient times ; that is to say, the modern 
languages permit their distinctive character to be more 
apparent than the ancient languages did. 
c c 



385 THE NOUN-GROUP. 

That this is the proper place for the numerals we con- 
clude not only from their assimilation to the nounal group 
on the one hand, but also from certain traces of affinity which 
they bear to the pronouns, and on which we shall have to 
touch in the next chapter. 

P.S. — By an oversight, which it is now too late to correct 
in its proper place, the Ordinal numbers have been omitted. 
It is in these that the numeral more particularly assumes 
an adjectival character. We retain all the ordinals in the 
Saxon form except two, namely, first and second. First rose 
into its place from the dialects; but second was borrowed 
from the French — a solitary instance among the numerals, 
properly so called. The Saxon word in its place was other, 
a word which has now a pronominal value only. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

We now cross the greatest chasm in language — the chasm 
which separates the presentives from the symbolics. So 
profoundly has this separation been felt by philologers, that 
some would even regard these two spheres of speech as 
radically and originally distinct from each other. The con- 
sideration of this theory would lead us beyond the track of 
the present treatise. It is only introduced here as a testi- 
mony to the greatness of the distinction between nouns and 
pronouns. Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, § 105, taught 
that in Sanskrit and the kindred languages (which include 
English) there are two classes of roots, the one of verbs and 
nouns, the other of ' pronouns, all original prepositions, con- 
junctions, and particles.' The former he calls Verbal Roots, 
the latter Pronominal Roots. 

On the other hand, we find Professor Max Miiller at dif- 
ferent periods holding different views as to the derivation of 
aham, the Sanskrit ego; and at one time he proposed to 
derive it from a Sanskrit verb ah to breathe, to speak. He 
has in his Lectures (Second Series, 1864) given up this view 
without joining the ranks of those who have assigned to it 
a pronominal root. He gives us moreover an excellently 
c c 2 



388 THE PRONOUN GROUP, 

suggestive illustration of the way in which the one class of 
words may be transplanted into the place of the other. 
' The pronoun of the first person in Cochin-Chinese is not 
a pronoun, but means " servant." / /ove is expressed in that 
civil language by servant loves! Thus he appears not to 
hold the necessity of the division of the radicals into two 
classes. 

If the word servant in this case is not a pronoun, it is 
at least in a fair way of becoming so. Already in English 
'your humble servant/ when used playfully as a substitute 
for /, is a pronoun ; as much so as your Honour, your 
Lordship, your Grace, your Highness, your Majesty. That 
all these have passed, or at least are passing, into the region 
of the symbolic, there can be little doubt. And these recent 
instances of the transference enables us to conceive how all 
pronouns may possibly have been generated from nouns. 

This wide difference between nouns and pronouns is 
equally certain, whatever may become of any etymological 
theory, inasmuch as it is a difference which depends not 
upon origin, but upon function. It is not our earliest im- 
pression when we first consider a butterfly, that it is a 
transformed caterpiller. But when we have discovered their 
identity of origin, we have in no wise removed their dif- 
ference of function. Although we know that the caterpiller 
and the butterfly are of the same family, this does not a 
whit alter the fact that they are two widely difl"erent things, 
in very different conditions of existence. Should it ever 
become capable of proof that all the pronouns had sprung 
from presentive roots, this would not invalidate the state- 
ment, that in passing from nouns to pronouns we traverse a 
wide gulf, and one which can hardly be overrated as the 
great central valley dividing the two great formations of 
which language is composed. 



SUB-PRESENTIVE. 389 

These two great hemispheres of language, which we 
designate as the Presentive and the Symbolic, which Bopp 
calls the Verbal and the Pronominal, may with equal propriety 
and greater brevity be simply called Nouns and Pronouns, 
for in fact every other part of speech branches out of these 
two. Of all the parts of speech hitherto noticed, it is the 
general quality (putting aside a few marked exceptions, of 
which the most prominent is the symbol-verb to be) that they 
are presentive. Of all the parts of speech which remain to 
be noticed it is the general quality that they are not pre- 
sentive but symbolic. 

And yet we are not come to a dead level of symboHsm. 
There are varieties of this character. And the first pronouns 
that we shall consider, are a class which combine with their 
symbolism a certain qualified sort of presentive power. 
How completely the personal pronouns are entitled to the 
character of symbolic we have already shown. But here 
we have to add, that besides the symbolic character, the 
pronoun / (for instance) has also a sort of reflected or 
borrowed presentiveness. which I propose to call a sub- 
presentive power. Though this pronoun has absolutely no 
signification by itself, yet when once the substantive has 
been given like a keynote, then from that time the pronoun 
continues to have, by a kind of delegacy, the presentive 
power which has been deputed to it by that substantive. 
We may see the same thing, if we consider the third per- 
sonal pronoun 

him. ' 

' It has been m}^ rare good fortune to have seen a large proportion of the 
greatest minds of our age, in the fields of poetry and speculative philosophy, 
such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, Tieck ; but none that I have ever 
known come near him.' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, 1 831. 

If we read the above sentence, and ask 'Who is himV 
we acknowledge the two qualities which constitute the 



390 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

substantive-pronoun: for we imply that the word does in^- 
dicate somebody, and that it does not say who the person 
indicated is. 

he. 

' He was a delightful man to walk with, and especially in a mountainous 
country. He was physically strong, had excellent spirits, and was joyous 
and boyish in his intercourse with his children and pupils.' — H. C. Robinson, 
Diary, 1 842. 

This sub - presentive character the personal pronouns 
have, as if by a right of contiguity to the great presentive 
body of words which we leave behind us. As we proceed 
with the catalogue of the pronouns, it will become less and 
less perceptible, until at length, when the pronoun passes into 
the conjunction, it entirely fades from the view, and leaves 
only the pure symbolic essence of words, whose meaning is 
so slight as to be imponderable, and whose value for the 
highest purposes of language is so great as to be almost 
inestimable. 

The pronouns are, as their name signifies, words which are 
the vicegerents of nouns. Accordingly, they vary in habit 
and function just in the same manner as nouns vary, and fall 
naturally into a similar division. This division is therefore 
into the same three groups as before, viz. I. Substantival, 
II. Adjectival, III. Adverbial. 



I. Substantival Pkonouns 

These are the pronouns of which, if the reader asked 
himself what presentive word they symbolise, he must make 
answer by a substantive. And of these the first in every 
sense are the personal pronouns. How ancient these are 
will best be seen by a comparative table. Most of them will 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 



391 



be found to be radically the same in all the languages of the 
Gothic stock. 

The statement would apply much more widely; but we 
must be on our guard against wandering when we are 
entering such a ' forest primeval ' as that of the pronominal 
group. Hear Professor Max Miiller on the antiquity of 
akam, which is the Sanskrit form of /. 

' It belongs to the earliest formations of Aryan speech, and we need not 
wonder that even in Sanskrit the materials out of which this pronoun was 
framed should have disappeared.' 

And just below, — 

' The Sanskrit ahatn, a word carried down by the stream of language from 
such distant ages, that even the Vedas, as compared with them, are but as it 
were of yesterday.' — Lectures, Second Series, p. 348. 



Pronoun of the First Person. 



GOTHIC. 

Singular. 

Norn, ik 


ICELANDIC. 

ek 


ANGLO-SAXON. 

ic 


ENGLISH. 

I 


Gen. 


meina 


min 


min 






Dat. 
Ace. 


mis 
mik 


mer 
mik 


me 
(mec) 


me) 


me 


Dual. 












Nom. 
Gen. 
Dat. -1 
Acc.j 


wit 
unkara (?) 

unkis 


wit 
okkar 

okkr 


wit 
uncer 

unc 






Plural. 












Nom. 
Gen. 


weis 
unsara 


wer 
war 


we 
(user) 


ure 


we 


Dat. ■» 
Acc.j 


unsis 


OSS 


US 




us 



The point to be noticed here is the paucity of English 
forms, when these are compared with the elder languages. 
Practically the difference is made up by the use of words 
like of, to, which have many other uses besides their applica- 
tion in this place. So that this is a case of simplificationj of 



393 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

economy of form, in the modern as contrasted with the elder 
languages. The word min as a genitive of Ic or / does not 
exist in English. It exists in a different character as mine, 
an adjectival pronoun. In German the same change has 
taken place : the word mein, originally an official genitive of 
ic^, has passed from the condition of a substantival to that of 
an adjectival pronoun. But the old substantival use of mein, 
in which it means of me, is retained in certain expressions : 
thus ©ebenfe mein = think of me. But the English mine is 
now adjectival only. The same observation applies exactly 
to ure, which has altogether dropped out of use as the 
genitive plural of a substantival pronoun, and has passed 
into the condition of an adjectival pronoun our. 

The contrast which the above table exhibits between the 
English on the one hand, and the ancestral languages on the 
other, is very striking. It shows how far we have moved 
from their condition in regard to an element of language 
which is justly esteemed among the most constant. But 
this will appear still more remarkable if we now proceed to 
compare with the English the same feature in French and 
Italian. 



Singular. 

Norn. Je 

Gen. de moi 

Dat. a moi 

Ace. me 

Plural. 

Nom. nous 

Gen. de nous 

Dat. a nous 

Ace. nous 



It is plain that our language has retained its native material 
throughout this pronoun, but that the shaping of that ma- 



ITALIAN. 


ENGLISH. 


lo 


I 


di me 


of me 


a me 


to me 


me 


me 


noi 


we 


di noi 


of us- 


a noi 


to us 


noi 


us 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 



393 



terial is entirely copied from the Romance languages. It 
will not be necessary to take up space with displaying the 
same fact throughout the pronouns of the second and third 
person. It will be obvious to any one who has acquired the 
elements of the Gothic and Romance languages, that the 
example applies to those cases, and to a great many others 
which we leave to the young philologer to explore for 
himself. 

Pronoun of the Second Person. 





GOTHIC. 


ICELANDIC. 


ANGLO-SAXON, 


ENGLISH. 


Singular. 










Nom. 


thu 


thu 


thu 


thou 


Gen. 


theina 


thin 


thin 




Dat. 


thus 


ther 


the 1 
(thee) the i 


thee 


Ace. 


thuk 


thik 


Dual. 










Nom. 


jut (?) 


(it) thit 


git 




Gen. 


inkwara 


ykkar 


incer 




Dat. 


inkwis 


ykkr 


inc 




Ace. 


inkwis 


ykkr 


(incit) ine 




Plural. 










Nom. 


jus 


(er) ther 


ge 


(ye) yoi 


Gen. 


izwara 


ythar 


eower 




Dat. 


izwis 


ythr 


eow '^ 




Aec. 


izwis 


ythr 


(eowie) eow J 


you 



The observations which have been made upon the pre- 
vious pronouns apply also here. The paucity of the modern 
forms is more marked here, because three out of the four 
are restricted in use. The genitives thin and eower have dis- 
.appeared as such, but they retain a place as adjectival 
pronouns, namely, thine and your. Here also, as in the 
case of the first pronoun, the blanks which the English 
column exhibits are supplied by a method of expression 
which we have learned from the French. 



394 ^^^ PRONOUN GROUP. 

Pronoun of the Third Person. 
This pronoun was in Saxon declined as follows : — 



Singular. 






Nom. he * 


heo 


hit^ 


Gen. his f 


hiref 


his 


Dat. him t 


hire + 


him 


Ace. hine 


hi 


hit* 


Plural (of all genders). 






N. and A, 


, hie (hi, hig, heo) 




Gen. 


hiera (heora, hira) 




Dat. 


him (heom) 





If you go through this old declension word by word, 
seeking in each case the modern equivalent, you will find 
that only three of its members are still perfectly living. They 
are those which are marked with an asterisk. I call a given 
word living, not when the mere form is extant, but when 
that form retains the animating function of the original 
word. In such a comparison we need not notice the 
changes of shape, when a word is known to be the same. 
Thus the difference of spelling between the words hire and 
her is insignificant. But the difference of function must be 
rigorously weighed, or we shall let the most important 
distinctions slip unvalued through our fingers. For this 
reason I have excluded the genitive case singular neuter, as 
being now a dead language to us. The neuter his no longer 
exists, except in old literature. It has entirely disappeared, 
and does not even remain in the discharge of any partial or, 
local function. Instances of its use are abundant in Shak- 
speare and our Bible ; as — 

' They came vnto the yron gate that leadeth vnto the citie, which opened 
to them of his owne accord,' — Acts xii. lo. 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 395 

Equally extinct is him, the dative neuter. But the masculine 
and feminine of these cases linger on with a thin and meagre 
function. The his, hire of the genitive are not indeed quite, 
but almost entirely represented and superseded by of him 
and of her. The his and her with which we are most familiar 
are no longer genitive cases of a substantival pronoun ; they 
have long ago become adjectival words, and they are desig- 
nated in Grammars as possessives. But as this does not 
quite shut out an occasional use of his, her, which is identical 
with that of Saxon times, I have marked these words with 
a dagger in the declension, to indicate partial continuity with 
the present English. And as to the two dative forms, which 
are also marked as partially surviving in our modern speech, 
their thread of identical vitality is very attenuated. Not once 
in a thousand times when him or her appear as substantive- 
pronouns, are they to be identified with this dative. We have 
it in such a rare instance as this : — 

'So they sadled him the asse.' — I Kings xiii. 13. 

And this is not modern English : we should now say ' they 
saddled for him.' The sort of instance in which the dative 
him is still in familiar use, is such as this: 'I gave him 
sixpence.' 

Here, as in other cases, the influence of the little words 0/ 
and to have come in, through imitation of the French, to give 
quite a new character to our declension of the pronoun. 

Now here would be the place to speak of the reflexive 
pronoun, if we had such a thing. But we lost it at a very 
early period, insomuch that it is only by a stretch of our 
field that we can regard it as coming within our view at all. 
This early deciduousness of our reflex pronoun is a peculiar 
feature of our language. In the sister languages it flourishes 
without sign of decay. Of course we have in some sort 



39<5 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

supplied the vacant place, but we can hardly be said to have 
formed another distinctively reflex pronoun. We make it by 
adding self to the words him, her, them, and so we get him- 
self, herself, themselves, instead of the common-gender fic^ of 
both numbers, which the German retains, and whereby it 
reminds us of what we have lost^. The latest surviving 
form of it in our .language having been adjectival, we shall 
return to this subject in the next section. 

Here we have to call attention to the fact that, our reflex 
pronoun having perished, the pronoun of the third person 
he, she, it, &c. performed for a long period the double office 
of a direct and of a reflex pronoun. 

' And Elisha said vnto him, Take bowe and arrowes. And he tooke vnto 
him bowe and arrowes.' — 2 Ki?igs xiii. 15. 

If we compare the Dutch version we shall find a distinction 
where our version has unto him in different senses : — 

' Ende Elisa seyde tot hem : Neemt eenen boge ende pijlen : ende hy nam 
tot sicb eenen boge ende pijlen.' 

In the following verses we have the?n reflexively : — 

'And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right 
against the Lord their God, and they built them high places in all their 
cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city. 

' And they set them vp images and groues in euery high hill, and vnder 
euery greene tree.' — 2 Kings xvii. 9, 10. 

But later in the same chapter we find themselves : — 

' So they feared the Lord, and made vnto themselues of the lowest of 
them priests of the high places, which sacrificed for them in the houses of 
the high places.' — ver. 32. 



^ Strictly speaking, it was the establishment of one old reflexive pronoun 
to the exclusion of another. Self is very ancient in this use, as may be seen 
by its frequency in the Icelandic and German. 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 397 

Thus, in the sermon preached at the funeral of Bishop 
Andrewes, we read — 

' The unjust judge righted the importunate widow but out of compassion 
to relieve him.' — Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, Andrewes, v. 274. 

The last word corresponds, not to the Latin eu7n, but to se, 
and the modern rendering of the passage would be : ' The 
unjust judge righted the importunate widow only out of 
compassion to (relieve) himself.' 

We have seen that the plural oi himself is themselves, but 
we have not yet seen how the word them had found its way 
into the circle of our personal pronouns. How recently it 
has acquired that position will readily be appreciated by 
a glance at the following brief conspectus of these pronouns 
as they appear before verbs in some of the most important 
sister-languages : — 

Singular. Plural. 

1st. 2nd. 3rd. 1st. 2nd. 3rd. 

Gothic ik thu is weis jus eis 

wer ther their 

we ge hi 

we (ye) you they 

vi I de 

wir ihr sie 

wij gy zy 

The pronoun of the second person singular is lost in 
Dutch; it is reserved as the pronoun of familiarity in 
German, while in English it is used only towards God. 
This is not peculiar to English, but a feature which the 
Germans retain as well as we. I say ' retain,' in the sense 
of engaging foreign aid, because I do not think it a national 
product, but a result of religious conditions. The two great 
Bible-translating nations have naturally, in their veneration 
for the words of Scripture, made this Hebrew idiom their 



Icelandic 


ek 


thu 


ham 


Saxon 


ic 


thu 


he 


English 




thou 


he 


Danish 


jeg 


du 


han 


German 


Ich 


du 


er 


Dutch 


ik 




hy 



398 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

own. It is only to be wondered at how the Dutch should 
have done otherwise. 

The natural tendency of the western civilization, apart 
from other influences, would be to shrink from such a use 
of fkou. The French have been led by this feeling, and in 
all addresses to God they use vous. It is not, therefore, 
from any radical diiference, but only from the effect of cir- 
cumstances, that the western languages are divided in this 
matter. A sensitiveness as to the social use of the second 
pronoun is common to all the nations of the West, but it 
exhibits itself in unequal degrees. We are influenced by it 
less than any of the other great languages. We have indeed 
dropped //lou, but we remain tolerably satisfied with jyoti, 
although we shrink from the use of it where reverence is 
due. At such times we are sensible of a void in our speech, 
unless the personage has a title, as jyour Lordship. Here it 
is that the pronominal use of Monsieur and Madame in the 
French language is felt to be so admirable a contrivance. 
Only, be it noted, that there is a substitution of a third- 
person formula to obviate the awkwardness of the second. 
This is what all the great languages have done. The 
German has done it in the directest manner by simply 
putting they (fie) for you (tl^r). Not more direct, but much 
dryer, is the (now I imagine rather obsolete) Danish fashion 
of calling a man to his face han, that is, he^ as a polite sub- 
stitute for the second person. It is common in Holberg's 
Plays. In Italian it is an abstract feminine substantive. 
But the most ceremonious of all in this matter is the 
ancient language of chivalry. The philologer who goes 
no deeper into Spanish, must at least acquaint himself 
with the formula which it substitutes for the second 
person. To say vos, that is you^ is with them a great 
familiarity, or even a great insult. At least, in the short 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 399 

form of OS. Something like this exists in Devonshire, where 
' I tell ee what ' {ee being disrespectfully short for yee) is 
often heard when altercation is growing dangerous. This 
is just the j/o OS digo of the following vivacious interview. 

' The archbishop had remained, while the ambassador was speaking, 
dumb with anger and amazement. At last, finding his voice, and starting 
from his seat in fury, he exclaimed : 

" Sirrah ^ ! I tell you that, but for certain respects, I would so chastise 
you for these words that you have spoken, that I would make you an 
example to all your kind. I would chastise you, I say ; I would make you 
know to whom you speak in such shameless fashion." 

"Sirrah!" replied Smith, in a fury too, and proud of, his command of 
the language which enabled him to retort the insult, " Sirrah ! I tell you 
that I care neither for you nor your threats." 

" Quitad OS ! Be off with you ! " shouted Quiroga, foaming with rage ; 
" leave the room ! awa}' ! I say." 

" If you call me Sirrah," said Smith, " I will call you Sirrah. I will 
complain to his majesty of this." ' — J. A. Froude, Reign of Elizabeth, v. 66. 

But to return to our table. While the above table indi- 
cates great permanence of the personal pronouns in general, 
it also shows us that this quality is weakest in the third 
person of both numbers : as between the Saxon and 
English, it is only in the third person plural that there is a 
real change. In that place a new word has been admitted 
to supersede the Saxon hi. It was a demonstrative pro- 
noun, the ancient plural of the word that. In Icelandic and 
Danish we see the analogous form, and this may partly 
explain the influence that made our people substitute they 
for hi. There was most hkely a demand for a new word 
in this place, in consequence of the decay of the old vowel- 
sounds. For a long time he had been the singular and hi 
the plural; and while this was the state of the pronoun, 

^ ' " Yo OS digo." Sirrah is too mild a word ; but we have no full equiva- 
lent. " Os " is used by a king to subjects, by a father to children, more 
rarely by a master to a servant. It is a mark of infinite distance between 
a superior and inferior. " Dog " would perhaps come nearest to the arch- 
bishop's meaning in the present connexion.' — Mr. Froude's note. 



400 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

there must have been a plain distinction in the sounds of 
these words which became obliterated as the vowels e and i 
both -underwent vocal modifications. In this predicament 
the demonstrative was drawn upon, as will be more fully 
shown in the next section. 

But in leaving this for the present, we must notice a kin- 
dred point. What is the origin of our affirmative yes .? 
The Saxon form isgese. The former syllable in this word 
is one of which we can at present give no better account 
than to call it a particle. But the second member -se looks to 
some eyes like a part of the demonstrative pronoun, which is 
declined in the next section. To others it p.ppears like a part 
of the symbol-verb is. The former view has a certain support 
from analogies in sister dialects. Thus, in the German of 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we find the affirmative 
particle ja in combination with pronouns of all persons, 
genders, and numbers, like any verb ! 

Singular. Plural. 

ja t(^ ! ia h)ir I 

ja bu ! l^vcl 

ia e.r ! ja [i ! fa eg ! ja fi ! 

Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, iii. 765. 

Grimm does not admit that our ge se is analogous to this 
Mid-High-Dutch y<2 er / because it would have to be not gese 
but ge he. To this it may be replied, that in proportion as 
we have evidence that the personal and the demonstrative 
were nearing one another, so in the same proportion this 
objection loses its force. It is, I believe, admitted that the 
French oui is from the Latin hoc-illiid (Kitchin's Translation 
of Brachet, p. 161), and that the affirmative oc of the dialect 
named the ' Lange d'oc ' was just the Latin hoc. But though 
the pronominal affinity of the affirmatives is in many cases 
certain, this does not interfere with their relation to the 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 4OI 

symbol-verb, for between all these there is much of com- 
munism. The further prosecution of this enquiry I leave 
for the exercise of the young student. 

We must now consider the Interrogative and Relative 
pronouns. 

Who, what, and which, with their inflections, of which 
we retain only two in their place ^, namely, whose and whom, 
are now both interrogative and relative. But in Saxon they 
were only interrogative, and not relative. Their change of 
character took place in the great French period, and was 
a direct consequence of French example. For that lan- 
guage, in common with all the Romance languages, uses the 
same sets of pronouns as interrogative s and as relatives. 

The Saxon relative system was based upon the demon- 
strative, and we retain a relic of it in our use of that as a 
relative. Where w^e now say that . . . ivhich, the Saxon was 
that . . . that (jjset . . . ])set). We have another interesting 
relic of this demonstrative-relative in our use of the . . . the in 
such expressions as, ' the more the merrier.' Our modern 
relative system is simply an adaptation of the Saxon interro- 
gatives, in imitation of the French. We went even further 
in this imitation, and combining the definite article with the 
relative pronoun, after the example of the French lequel, 
laquelle, we got our old familiar the which : — 

' I will not ouerthrow this citie, ' le ne subvertirai point la ville de 

for the which thou hast spoken.' — laquelle tu as parle.' — La saincte 
Genesis xix. 21. Bible, Rochelle, 1616. 

So in the following beautiful stanza : — 

' Where making joyous feast theire dales they spent 
In perfect love, devoide of hatefuU strife, 

- Why, where, when, whence, are indeed inflections of who, what, and 
they are retained in the language ; but they are moved to another place, 
namely, the company of the adverbs. 

Dd 



402 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

Allide with bands of mutuall couplement ; 

For Triamoiid had Canacee to wife, 

With whom he ledd a long and happie Hfe ; 

And Cambel tooke Cambina to his fere, 

The which as Hfe were to cache other Hefe. 

So all alike did love, and loved were, 
That since their dayes such lovers were not found elsewhere.' 

The Faerie Queene, iv. 3. 52. 
This change is more than superficial; it amounts to a 
transposition of internal relations in the fabric of our lan- 
guage. This and other organic changes into which we 
have been led by French example, must certainly be unper- 
ceived by those who go on affirming that the influence of 
French upon English has been only superficial. 

It belongs, however, to the nature of imitations that a 
large proportion of them are short-lived. They differ fronl 
the native growth as cuttings differ from seedlings. Only 
a reduced number gets well and permanently rooted. We 
proceed to notice an instance of this. 

The relative which, as a personal relative, is no longer 
used, and it is a well-known peculiarity of the English of our 
Bible, that it is so common there. Instances of this use are 
indeed numerous beyond the pages of that version. The 
following is from a brass in Hutton Church, near Weston- 
super-Mare : — 

' Pray for ye soules of Thomas Payne Squier & Elizabeth hyis wiffe 
which departed y^ xv"^ day of August y^ yere of o"^ lord god m.ccccc.xxviij.' 

But when this relative is used of persons, it has generally 
a noun closely antecedent ; and a case like the following has 
the effect of a solecism : — 

' Of us who is here which cannot very soberly advise his brother ? Sir, 
you must learn to strengthen your faith by that experience which heretofore 
you have had,' &c. — Richard Hooker, Sermon I, ed. Keble, vol. iii. p. 479. 

Instead of this first ivhich we should now put that : ' Of 
the present company, who is there that cannot very seriously 
advise his brother ? ' 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 403 

Which is in its origin a composite word derived from who 
and like. Its Saxon form was hwilc, which was made of 
hwa and lie. Compare sueh in the next section. 

Who7?i is now used only personally. But there is no 
historical reason for this, beyond modern usage. Time was 
when it was used of things as much as what, and examples 
occur in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The following 
is of the date 1484, and it contains the which as well as 
zvhom in the use to be illustrated : — ■ 

' Item. I bequethe to the auter of saint John the Baptist and saynt 
Nicholas the which is myne owen chapell in the parish chirche of New- 
londe in the Forest of Dene in whome my body shalbe buried In primis 
a crosse of silver,' &c. — The Will of Dame Jane Lady Barre, in Mr. 
Ellacombe's Memoir of Bittoti, p. 47. 

And lest it should be supposed that such a use can only 
be produced from obscure writings, I may mention the 
Faerie Queene, in a passage which is quoted above on p. 135, 
where whom refers to a ship. 

Before quitting this set, it may be interesting to observe 
that ivhat in Anglo-Saxon had a peculiar function as a lead- 
ing interjection, a usage which is familiar to those who know 
the dialect of the Lake district. The minstrel often began 
his lay with HwcBi I 

The noblest of Anglo-Saxon poems, the Beowulf, begins 
with this exclamation : 

' Hwaet we Gar Dena on gear dagum 
peod cyninga )>rim ge frunon 
Hu J^a ae'Selingas ellen fremedon.* 

What bo I the tales of other times 

The Gar-Danes' mighty realm and martial proud array 

And practice bold of princes in ajffray. 

Interrogation, appeal, expostulation, admiration, lie very 

near to one another in the structure of the human mind, and 

hence we see in many languages an approach to this habit. 

In Latin there is the rhetorical use of quid ! in French of 

D d 2 



404 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

quoi ! and if we would see a situation in which several of 
those meanings blend inseparably, we may refer to Proverbs 
xxxi. 2, where the version of 1 6 1 1 is rigidly literal, while that 
of 1535 is homely and unconstrained according to wont: 

Miles Cover dale. 161 1. 

* My Sonne, thou sonne of my ' What, my sonne ! and what, the 
body: O my deare beloued sonne.' sonne of my wombe ! and what, the 
sonne of my vowes ! 

Here we must notice the old substantive-pronoun so, 
though it is no longer found in this character standing by 
itself. The Saxon form was swa, with a rarer poetic form 
SE ; and already in the earhest Saxon literature it had lost its 
original independence. Then, as now, it occurred only in 
composite expressions, as swa hwa swa, whoso ; swa hwcei 
swa, whatso, &c. These are, however, sufficient to deter- 
mine its ancient habit, and to indicate from what original 
all the varieties of so and its composite such have had their 
derival. 

In the words whoso, whatso, the so is manifestly subor- 
dinated, and has lost its accent. This was the result of 
the elevation of who, ivhat, with the depression of so. 
Anciently so was the leading element, what was indefinite 
and enclitic. 

We have yet a set of pronouns to mention before closing 
this section ; namely, the Indefinite. The chief of these was 
in the Saxon period a symbolised man, which is the chief 
indefinite pronoun to this day in German. It should also 
be noticed that the French on is only a form of homme, in 
which the spelling has varied with the sublimation of the 
meaning. This indefinite man, or, as it was oftener writ- 
ten, mon, we lost at an early date, in the great shaking that 
followed the Conquest. But it is so natural a word for a 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 405 

pronoun to grow out of, that we do from time to time fall 
as if unconsciously into this use. In the following quota- 
tion from Mark viii. 4, a vian is a manifest pronoun; the 
Greek is dwrjaerai ris. To show the pedigree of the expres- 
sion in this place, three versions are put side by side : — 

Wiclif, iJ,^g. Tyndale, 1^26. The Bible of 161 1. 

' Wherof a man schal ' From whence myght ' From whence can a 

mowe fille hem with a man sufFyse them with man satisfie these men 

looues here in wildir- breed here in the wyl- with bread here in the 

nesse ? ' dernes ? ' wildernes ? ' 

This is, however, but a feeble example of the pronominal 
use of the word man, a use which it has been our singular 
fortune to lose after having possessed it in its fulness. In 
place of it, we resort to a variety of shifts for what may justly 
be entitled a pronoun of pronouns, that is to say, a pronoun 
which is neither / nor we, nor you nor /key, but which may 
stand for either or all of these or any vague commixture of 
two or three of them. Sometimes we say ' you ' not mean- 
ing, nor being taken to mean j'ou at all, but to express 
a corporate personality which quite eludes personal appli- 



' It is always pleasant to be forced to do what you wish to do, but what 
until pressed, you dare not attempt.' — Dean Hook, Archbishops, vol. iii. c. 4' 

This jyoti is often convenient to the poet as a neutral 
medium of address, applicable either to one particular person, 
or to all the world : — 

' Yet this, perchance, you'll not dispute, — 
That true Wit has in Truth its root, 
Surprise its flower, Delight its fruit. 
Or haply, this may be more clear, 
The pirouette of an Idea ; 
Which, just as you conclude your grasp, 
Slips laughing from your empty clasp, 
Presenting in strange combination 
Some ludicrous association ; 



406 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

Which you repel with indignation, 
But cannot find its confutation : — 
I know no other image fit 
To tell you what I mean by Wit.' 

W. M. A. in The Spectator, July 2, 1870. 

Sometimes, again, it is we, and at other times it is they 
which represents this much-desired but long-lost or not-yet- 
invented ' representative ' pronoun. We render the French 
on dit by they say. 

But besides the resort to pronouns of a particular person 
in order to achieve the effect of a pronoun impersonal, we 
have also some substantives which have been pronominaHsed 
for this purpose, as person, people, body, folk. 



• Bothwell was not with her at Seton. As to her shooting at the butts 
when there, this story, like most of the rest, is mere gossip. People do not 
shoot at the butts in a Scotch February.' — Qtiarlerly Review, vol. 128, 
p. 511. 

body. 

' The foolish body hath said in his heart, There is no God.' — Psahn liii. i, 
elder version. 

And from this we get the composite pronouns somebody, 
nobody, everybody. In like manner, but less fixed in habit, 
some people, and also some folk, as in the well known refrain, 

' Some folk do, some folk do ! ' 

Perhaps the French on has not been without some sort 
of undefined eifect in this region of our language, by guiding 
us through its mere sound to a use of the first numeral 
which is unexampled in other languages. Some of our pro- 
nominal uses of one are easily paralleled in other languages, 
the one and the other = Vun et Tautre ; ofte another = Vun 
Tautre, &c., but in that particular use of one which more 
precisely belongs to this place, as when we say, ' One never 



SUBSTANTIVAL PRONOUNS. 407 

knows what this sort of thing may lead to/ it would be im- 
possible to put in that place /'u7t or ein or unus or eh. 

There are instances in which one language catches up 
a confused idea from another, and a mere sound which has 
been heard will suggest a term totally different in idea from 
the meaning of that sound. The first numeral has an 
intimate natural affinity with the pronominal principle, 
and this is widely acknowledged in the languages by the 
pronominal uses of it which are very common and very 
well known. But this English use is far from com- 
mon, if it is not absolutely singular ; namely, when it is 
employed as a veiled Ego, thus : ' One may be excused for 
doubting whether such a policy as this can have its root in 
a desire for the public welfare.' 

The o?te of which we speak is quite distinct from those 
cases in which it is little removed from the numeral, as : 
' One thinks this, and one thinks that.' In this case one is 
fully toned, but not so in the case referred to, as when a 
person who is pressed to buy stands on the defensive with, 
' One can't buy everything, you know ;' here the one is 
lightly passed over with that sensitiveness which accom- 
panies egotism. 

It is still more distinct from the case in which one appears 
in concord or under government : — 

' As nations ignorant of God contrive 
A wooden one.' William Cowper, The Timepiece. 

' And unto one her note is gay, 

For now her little ones have ranged ; 
And unto one her note is changed, 
Because her brood is stol'n away.' In Memoriam, xxi, 

' The strictly logical deduction from the premises is not always found ia 
practice the true one.' — Sir J. T. Coleridge, Keble, p. 388. 

' There will always be sharp men to practice on dull ones.' 



40 8 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

' Reducing the abject one to a choice between captivity and starvation.'- — 
Anthony TroUope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, ch. ix. 

A variety of other pronouns belong to this set, which we 
have only space just to hint at. Such are ^/u'ng, somethings 
everything, nothing ; wight, whit, deal. 

There was, towards the close of the Saxon period, an 
imitation from the Latin, by which the word hwa -= ' who ' was 
adopted as an indefinite pronoun. The Latin si quis was 
the model, after which was made the Saxon gif hwa = if who. 
Thus, in the Saxon Chronicle, 1086, ' Gif hwa gewilnige^,' 
&c. = Si quis optaverit, &c. This is one of the cases already 
touched upon, in which imitations prove to be short-lived. 

We have thus reached the natural termination of this 
section. Having started from the pronouns which were most 
nearly associated with substantival ideas, we have reached 
those whose characteristic it is (as their name conveys) to 
be indefinite, to shun fixed associations, and thus to be ever 
ready for a latitude of application as wide as the widest 
imaginable sweep of the mental horizon. 



IL Adjectival Pkonouns. 

The adjectival character of some pronouns is very ap- 
parent; others which are classed with them will be found 
less manifestly adjectival. We will begin the section with 
some of the plainest. 

Such is a composite word, made up of so and like. The 
Saxon form was swilc, from swa and lie. In the German 
form fold; the original elements are very traceable : in 
Danish it is slig, and in Scottish sic. It is curious how 
words rediscover the elements of their composition after they 
have become obscure, by a tendency to sj^mphytise again 



ADJECTIVAL PRONOUNS. 4O9 

once more with the word which they have akeady absorbed. 
Hence we get such-like ; and still more usual in Scotland 
is sic-like. This such is a highly pronominal word. 

' In such matters a little evidence goes a long way.* — Archceological 
journal. No. 104, p. 331. 

The pronominal character of such is here apparent from 
the fact that the reader must refer to the page quoted in 
order to recover the presentive idea towards which it pointed 
in this passage. 

This adjective reverts, like other adjectives, to substantival 
habits, and it sometimes fills the place which has been left 
vacant by the ancient substantive-pronoun so described in 
the former section. In its substantive and adjective function 
alike, it is often the antecedent to a relative pronoun, and 
there has been a good deal of fastidiousness about this 
relative pronoun, as to which is the right one to come after 
such. We have now decided (it seems) that such can 
have no relative after it but as. And as a proof of the 
sort of affection that words bear to kindred, it may be 
noticed that as is a composite word made up of all and so. 
However, our literature abounds with instances of other 
relatives after such. 

such which. 

' Of such characters which combined the species best, I selected the most 
remarkable.' — John Lindley, A Monograph of Roses, 1820, p. xx. 

such who. 

' It is very natural for such who are treated ill and upbraided falsely, to 
find out an intimate friend that will hear their complaints,' &c. — Addison 
(171 1), Spectator, No. 170. 

Same. This word is not found (as a pronoun) in Anglo- 
Saxon literature, and the question arises whence it came to 
be so familiar in English. Jacob Grimm thinks it was ac- 
quired through the Norsk language, in which samr is a 



4IO THE PRONOUN GROUP, 

prevalent pronoun. The Saxon word in its place was t'lk, 
which is so well known to us through Scottish literature. 
But, as there are traces of its having existed at an earlier 
stage of Saxon, it is possible that it had never died out, but 
that, having been superseded by z7k in the written language, it 
had fallen into temporary obscurity. Many genuinely native 
elements are found in modern English which are unknown 
in Saxon literature, and it is only reasonable to conclude 
that the vocabulary of the Saxon literature imperfectly repre- 
sented the word-store of the nation. 

Sundry is an adjectival pronoun formed upon an old 
Saxon adverb sundor, which we still retain in the compound 
asunder. 

Each is from the Saxon celc, having lost its /, just as 
which and such have. This cbIc was equivalent to our 
present every, so that the word for ' everybody ' was celcman, 
and for ' everything ' it was (Elcping. The spelling each is 
a modernism ; in Chaucer it is ech and eche. This is quite 
a distinct word from the ilk mentioned above. 

Every grew out of the habit of strengthening ceIc by pre- 
fixing cefre, whence arose the composite pronoun CBuer-cElc 
or euer-elc, which means ever-each, and which occurs under 
a variety of orthographic forms in Layamon. It had become 
everych by Chaucer's time, and then it had attracted to itself 
another pronoun, namely one, and so we get the oft-recur- 
ring mediaeval form everychon. To go no further than the 
Prologue, 1. 31 : — 

' So hadde I spoken with hem euerichoon 
That I was of hir felaweshipe anoon/ Hengwrt MS. 



We find this form in Miles Coverdale's Bible, 1535 : — 

' Idols and abhominacions of ye house off Israel paynted euerychone 
)unde aboute the wall.* — Ezechiel viii. lo. 

Very has retained so much of its old presentive character 



ADJECTIVAL PRONOUNS. 4II 

that it has brought over with it all the degrees of comparison, 
and we have in the ranks of the pronouns very, verier, veriest. 

' The very presence of a true-hearted friend yields often ease to our 
grief.' — Richard Sibbes, SouVs Conflict, 14. 

' In the very centre or focus of the great curve of volcanoes is placed the 
large island of Borneo.' — Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, ch. i. 

Both verier and veriest occur in Shakspeare. A choice 
illustration may be had from a letter written in 1666 by the 
wife of the English ambassador at Constantinople to her 
daughter Poll in England, which Poll has been adopted by 
a rich relative, and is inclining to vanity ^ : — 

' Whereas if it were not a piece of pride to have y'^ name of keeping y"" 
maide, she y* waits on y"" good grandmother might easily doe as formerly 
you know she hath done, all y° business you have for a maide, unless as you 
grow old"" you grow a veryer Foole, which God forbid ! ' 

Certain is an adjective which has been presentive not 
long ago, but it is now completely pronominalised : — 

' At Clondilever, a farmer was returning from his usual attendance at 
the Roman Catholic Chapel on Sunday, when he was stopped by five men 
with revolvers, who warned him that if he interfered any further with a cer- 
tain person as to possession of a certain field,' &c. — April 30, 1870. 

The demonstrative pronouns this and that were thus de- 
clined in Saxon : — 







Neut. Masc. Fern. 


Neut. Masc. 


Fern. 




'Nom 


thast se 


seo 


this 


thes 


theos 




Ace. 
"^ Abl. 


thaet thone tha 


this 


thisne 


thas 


Singular 


thy 


thaere 




thise 


thisse 




Dat. 


tham 


thsere 




thisum 


thisse 




^Gen. 

rNom 
Ace. 


thaes 


thaere 




thises 


thisse 




1 


tha 


thas 




Plurai, 


^ Abl. 
Dat. 


} 


tham 




thissum 




^Gen. 




thara 




thiss£ 





^ Of this vain Poll, the great granddaughter was Jane Austen, and it is in 
the Memoir of the latter, by the Rev. J. E. Austen-Leigh (Bentley, 1870), 
that this admirable letter has been published. 



41^ THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

Of these two words, the former was in Saxon the more 
prominent by far, and we should in reference to that stage 
of the language not say 'this and that,' but rather 'that 
and this.' 

It was f/icB/, se, seo, which supplied the definite article, and 
therefore it was current in some one or other of its cases in 
almost every phrase that was spoken or written. This will 
make it easier to understand how it should have come about 
that fAd, the plural of this demonstrative, took the place of 
h' as personal pronoun of the third person plural. And, to 
pursue this transition to its consequences ; a place was now 
vacant, the demonstrative required a plural of its own. 
Here we have a beautiful example of the innate resource 
of language, which often is most admirable in this, that a 
new want is supplied out of a mere nothing. The sister 
demonstrative //it's had a plural which was grammatically 
written /Ms, and with this full a it was pronounced so as to 
be very like our //lose, which is indeed its modern form. 
But people whose education had been neglected were apt 
to make a plural in their own way by just adding on a little 
vague e to the singular fh's, and so they (the ungrammatical 
people) made a plural /h's-e. After a certain period of con- 
fusion, during which both demonstratives admitted a great 
variety of shapes ^, they at last settled down to this, that the 
word //lose which was the original old plural of /Ms, should 
pass over to the other side and be the plural of //la/, while 
/h's should make its plural //lese according to the later 
popular invention. 

What was at the root of all this stir appears to have been 
the newly-felt insufficiency of the distinction between the sin- 
gular he and the plural hi. And perhaps it should be added 

' For which see Mr. Morris's Specimens of Early English, pp. xxvii. sq. 



ADJECTIVAL PRONOUNS. 413 

the want of distinction between the singular dative km and 
the plural dative, also written h'm, though sometimes keom. 
In the following passage, Mark vi. 48-50, we find Mm three 
times, and in every case it corresponds to the modern 
//lem : — 

' And he geseah hig on rewette swincende ; him wses wi'Serweard wind : 
and on niht ymbe ))a feor'San waeccan, he com to him ofer ])a sae gangende, 
and wolde hig forbugaii, 

pa hig hine gesawon ofer J^a sae gangende, hig wendon \>sst hit unfaele 
gast wsere, and hig clypedon : 

hig ealle hine gesawon and wurdon gedrefede. And sona he spraec to 
him, and cwse'5 : GelyfaS ; ic hit eom ; nelle ge eow ondraedan.' 

So that, as the English language emerged from its French 
incubus, it gradually substituted /key, tkeir, them, in the 
place of the elder ki, heora, him. This change was not 
quite established till far on in the fifteenth century. In 
Chaucer we have still the elder forms in free use, and he 
wrote them thus : ki, kir, kem. Here is a couplet with two 
of these forms in it : — 

' So hadde I spoken with hem everichon 
That I was of hir felawship anon.' Prologue 31. 

It may not be amiss to add that when in provincial Eng- 
lish we meet with 'em in place of ikevi, it must be regarded 
as an ehded form not of them, but of hem. 

These two pronouns have held a great place in our lan- 
guage. We can hardly omit to notice what may be called 
their rhetorical use. This has a rhetorical use expressive of 
contempt. It was by means of this pronoun that Home 
Tooke expressed his contempt for the philology of Harris's 
Hermes : — 

' There will be no end of such fantastical writers as this Mr. Harris, who 
takes fustian for philosophy.' — Diversions of Purley, part ii. c. 6. 

That, on the other hand is a great symbol of admiration ; 
in illustration of which we may cite Mr. Gladstone's enco- 



414 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

mium of political justice, in the peroration of his speech on 
the second reading of the Irish Land Bill, March 1 1, 1870 : 

' The face of justice is like the face of the god Janus, It is like the face 
of those lions, the work of Landseer, which keep watch and ward around the 
record of our country's greatness. She presents one tranquil and majestic 
countenance towards every point of the compass and every quarter of the 
globe. That rare, that noble, that imperial virtue has this above all other 
qualities, that she is no respecter of persons, and she will not take advantage 
of a favourable moment to oppress the wealthy for the sake of flattering the 
poor, any more than she will condescend to oppress the poor for the sake of 
pampering the luxuries of the rich.' 

Both of these uses are to be paralleled in Greek and 
Latin, as the student of those languages should ascertain 
for himself, if he is not already familiar with the feature. 

But a more peculiar interest attaches to this pronoun 
from the circumstance that out of it has been carved the 
definite article. The word /he is simply an abbreviation of 
/kcsf on which the French pronoun le has probably exercised 
some influence in the way of shaping its form. 

And not unfrequently we experience in the course of 
reading, especially in poetry, a certain force in the definite 
article, which we could not better convey in words than by 
saying it reminds us of its parentage, and calls the demon- 
strative to mind. It is one of those fugitive sensations that 
will not always come when they are called for ; but perhaps 
the reader may catch what is meant if the following line 
from the Chrisiia7i Year is offered in illustration : — 

' The man seems following still the funeral of the boy.' 

The same thing may however be shown in a manner 
more agreeable to science. We find cases in which the same 
text is variously rendered according as the interpreters have 
seen a demonstrative or a definite article in the original : — . 

Ezekiel xi. 19. 
1535- 3611. 

'That stony herte wil 1 take out '1 wil take the stonie herte out 
of youre body, & geue you a fleshy of their flesh, and will giue them an 
herte.* heart of flesh.' 



ADJECTIVAL PRONOUNS. 4I5 

But there is a case, and that rather a frequent one, in 
which the is still a demonstrative and is not a definite article 
at all. It is the ablative case thy of the Saxon declension 
above given, and answers to the Latin eo before com- 
paratives. When it is doubled, it answers to the Latin qtw 
. . . eo, just as thcet thcBt in Saxon was equivalent to the Latin 
id quod. 

' The more luxury increases, the more urgent seems the necessity for thus 
securing a luxurious provision.' — John Boyd-Kinnear, WomarHs Work, p. 353. 

The next adjectival pronoun which we will notice shall 
be the word one. It has already been largely spoken of in 
the former section, where it was seen to occupy an impor- 
tant place. But its substantival function is after all less 
important in the development of our language than its 
adjectival habit ; because out of this has grown that member 
which is the most distinctive perhaps that can be fixed upon 
as the mark of a modern language. The definite article is 
found in some of the ancient languages, as in Hebrew and 
Greek, but none of them had produced an indefinite article. 
The general remark has already been made in an earlier 
chapter, that it is in the symbolic element we must seek the 
distinctive character of the modern as opposed to the 
ancient languages. And we may appeal to the indefinite 
article as the most recent and most expressive feature of this 
modern characteristic. In the Greek of the New Testament 
there are certain indications (known to scholars) of some- 
thing like an indefinite article. 

In its adjectival use this pronoun is generally set in 
antithesis to another ; as, — 

' Yf one Sathan cast out another.' — Matt. xii. tr. Coverdale (1535). 

' Mike. I say one man 's as good as anither ; what do you say, Pat ? 
Pat. To be shure and that he is, and a dale betther too ! ' 



4l6 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

Out of this has been produced the indefinite article. It 
has not sprung directly from the numeral one, but from that 
word after it has passed through the refining discipline of 
a symboHc usage, 

The old spelling of the numeral was an; and this 
ancient form is preserved in the article an or a. This gives 
us occasion to remark that old forms are often preserved in 
the more elevated functions, while the original and inferior 
function has admitted changes. 

Having thus indicated the sources of our two articles, let 
us observe that they still carry about them the traces of their 
extraction. The magnifying quality of the demonstrative 
//la/ has been noticed above. Its descendant the definite 
article retains something of this ancestral quality. We all 
know how the ceremonious T/ie adds grandeur to a name, 
and how all titles of office and honour are jealously retentive 
of this prefix. 

On the other hand, the indefinite ardcle, which is de- 
scended from the litdest of the numerals, exercises a 
diminishing effect, as in the following : — 

' This little life-boat of an earth, with its noisy crew of a mankind, and 
all their troubled history, will one day have vanished.' — Thomas Carlyle, 
Essays ; Death of Goethe. 

These minute vocables are the real ' winged words ' of 
human speech ; or, to speak with more exactness, they are 
the wings of other words, by means of which smoothness 
and agility is imparted to their motion. It is in the ardcles 
that the symbolic element of language finds its most ad- 
vanced development ; and it is not by means of these alone, 
but by means of that whole system of words of which these 
are the foremost and most perfect type, that the modern 
languages when compared with the ancient are found to 
excel in alacrity and sprightliness. 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 417 



III. Adverbial Pronouns. 



This chapter of pronouns keeps up on the whole a 
parallel course to the chapter on nouns. Like that, it is 
divided into three main sections, Substantives, Adjectives, 
Adverbs. Moreover, as in that chapter the third section 
assumed a trifid form, so also here do we find ourselves 
compelled by the nature of the subject to divide this final 
section into three paragraphs. In this symbolic as well as 
in that presentive region, the adverbs assume the three forms 
of Flat, Flexional, and Phrasal. 

I. Of the Flat Pronoun- Adverbs. 

The higher we mount in the structure of language the 
more delicate a matter will it be to analyse and make sharp 
distinctions. The presentive adverbs pass off by such fine 
and imperceptible shadings into a symbolic state, that the 
division must needs be exposed to uncertainty. To let this 
the more plainly appear, we will begin here with the same 
strain of adverbs as we left off with at the close of the 
nounal adverbs. 

Up. This is clearly a presentive word so long as the 
original idea of elevation is preserved. But it passes off 
into a more refined use, a more purely mental service, and 
then we call it no longer a noun but a pronoun. 

The instance of breaking-up is an interesting one. It is 
one of those in which the flat adverb at one time attached 
itself closely to the verb, indeed almost symphytically, and 
had with the verb been subjected to a peculiar appropriation 
of meaning. This expression now is apt to suggest the 
E e 



41 8 THE PRONOUN GROUP, 

holidays of a school-boy, but in the sixteenth century it was 
the proper expression for burglary : — 

' If a thiefe bee found breaking vp.' — Exodus xxii. 2, 

' Suffered his house to be broken vp.' — Matthew xxiv. 43. 

' If he beget a sonne that is a breaker vp of a house.' — Ezekiel xviii. 10 

(margin). 

Mr. Froude quotes a letter of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 
in which a burglary is confessed in these terms : — 

' With other companions who were in straits as well as myself, I was 
forced to give the onset and break up a house in Warwickshire, not far 
from Wakefield.' — History, vol. xi. p. 28. 

Also an old ship is sold ' to be broken up,' and there is 
a rich variety of expressions in which up figures in such 
a character as belongs here, e.g. to be 'knocked up,' 
' done up,' ' patched up,' to be ' up to a thing,' ' up with 
a person,' &c. 

still. 

' Having past from my hand under a broken and imperfect copy, by fre- 
quent transcription it still run {sic) forward into corruption.' — Thomas 
Brown, Religio Medici, Preface. 

' They are left enough to live on, but not enough to enable them still to 
move in the society in which they have been brought up.' — John Boyd- 
Kinnear, Womafi's Work, p. 353. 

In these two examples the reader should notice that 'still 
run ' and ' still to move ' would be mere stultifications if the 
word s/i'll were taken in its original and presentive significa- 
tion of ' stillness.' This affords a sort of measure of the 
great change that has passed over the word. 

jusl. 

' How much of enjoyment life shows us, just one hair's breadth beyond 
our power to grasp ! ' — The Bramleighs, ch. xxxi. 

The word rather may serve as an illustration of the 
grounds on which we assign these words to the pronominal 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 419 

category. In an interesting letter from Sir Hugh Luttrell, 
in the year 1420, we have this word in its presentive sense. 
He is in France, and he is displeased that certain orders of 
his have not been carried out, and he hints that if his com- 
mands are not fulfilled, he is alive, and ' schalle come home, 
and that rather than som men wolde,' that is t*© say, he 
shall be at home earlier than would be agreeable to some 
people. Rather is the comparative of an obsolete adjective 
rathe, which signified ' early.' It is found once in Milton, 
Lycidas, 142 : 

' Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies, 
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Gessamine.' 

Now compare the way in which we habitually employ this 
word; and a plainer example could hardly be found of the 
distinction between the nature of the noun and that of the 
pronoun. The word is so common that we can hardly read 
a paragraph in any daily or weekly article without coming 
across it, and probably more than once. 

' Various appropriate sermons were preached with all desirable promp- 
titude, and the assertion was made in various forms that Mr. Dickens was 
one of the chief teachers of the day : — he had provided the public with a 
great quantity of thoroughly innocent literature ; Mr. Dickens shewed 
a thoroughly kindly nature in every line that he wrote. . . Yet all this 
scarcely entitles a man to the sort of praise which belongs to great moral 
reformers. It was his chief fault that he played with sentimental situations 
in a way that seems to imply an absence of very profound feeling. He 
fails to be truly pathetic because we do not see the agony wrung out of a 
strong man by the inevitable wrongs and sorrows of the world, but the easy 
yielding of a nature that rather likes a little gentle weeping. Mr, Pickwick 
with his love of mankind, stimulated by milk-punch, is not the most elevated 
type of philanthropy, though it is one which is unfortunately prevalent at 
the present day. In these respects Mr. Dickens's influence tended rather 
towards a softening of the moral fibre than towards strengthening it, . . 
We can only take the morality preached in his published works, of which 
every man is at liberty to form an opinion And though we may admit it 
to be perfectly harmless, and to provide a pleasant stock of maxims for 
people who wish to get through the word quietly and easily, we cannot 
hold that it was of that invigorating character which is most to be desired 
or which would entitle its organ to be considered as on that account a great 

E e 2 



420 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

benefactor of mankind. We rather feel that it is poor food for the soul of 
man, and that the preachers who have identified it with their own highest 
aspirations have not raised our opinion of their insight into the wants of 
the age.' — July 1 6, 1870. 

/OO. 

' Spake I not too truly, O my knights ? 
Was I too dark a prophet when I said 
To those who went upon the Holy Quest, 
That most of them would follow wandering fires, 
Lost in the quagmire ? ' Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail. 

That famous pronominal factor so, which has already- 
been spoken of in both the previous sections, must come in 
here likewise : — 

' And he was competent whose purse was so.' 

William Cowper, The Time-Piece. 

'A declaration so bold and haughty silenced them and astonished their 
associates.' 

The presentive idea to which this so points back may- 
be found by reference to Robertson's Charles the Fifth, 
Bk. I., anno 1516, and the abruptness of the clause as it 
stands, gives a measure of the pronominal nature of the 
adverb so. 

further, 

' Or dwells within our hidden soul 

Some germ of high prophetic power, 
That further can the page unveil. 
And open up the future hour.' 
G. J. Cornish, Come to the Woods, and Other Poems, Ixxiii. 

jump. 

' In goodness, therefore, there is a latitude or extent, whereby it cometh 
to pass that even of good actions some are better than other some ; whereas 
otherwise one man could not excel another, but all should be either abso- 
lutely good, as hitting jump that indivisible point or centre wherein goodness 
consisteth ; or else missing it they should be excluded out of the number of 
well-doers.' — Richard Hooker, Of the Laws, &c., I. viii. 8. 

soh'd. 
' " You don't mean that ! " "I do, solid ! " ' (Leicestershire.) 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 4^1 

/low. 

' How dull sermons are, compared with the brilliant compositions which 
may be read in the newspapers ! ' — J. Llewellyn Davies, The Gospel and 
Modern Life (1869), p. 218. 

Now we come upon a feature which is inconsiderable in 
its bulk, unimposing in its appearance, and which is incon- 
spicuous by the very continuousness of its presence ; but 
yet one which covers with its influence half the realm of 
language, which involves one of the most curious of pro- 
blems, and which raises one of the most important questions 
in the whole domain of philological speculation. This is 
the apparatus of Negation. It may be out of our reach to 
attain to the primitive history of the negative particle ; but 
if we are to judge of its source by the track upon which it 
is found, if origin is to be judged of by kindred, if the 
unknown is to be surmised by that which is known, it is in 
this portion of the fabric of speech — namely, in the flat 
pronoun-adverbs — that we must assign its birthplace to the 
negative particle. 

The negative particle in our language is simply the con- 
sonant N. In Saxon it existed as a word ne, but we have 
lost that word, and it is now to us a letter only, which enters 
into many words, as into no, not, nought, none, never. In 
French, however, this particle is still extant as a separate 
word ; as ' Je ne vols pas.' 

The following parallel quotations exhibit this particle both 
in its pure and simple state, and also in combinations such 
as we are, and also such as we are not, familiar with : — 

Anglo-Saxon, 995. Wydiffe, 1389. 

' Ne geseah naefre nan man God, ' No man euere sy3 God, no but 

buton se an-cenneda sunu hit cy(5de, the oon bigetun sone, that is in the 

se is on his fseder bearme. And Saet bosum of the fadir, he hath told out. 

is Johannes gewitnes, Sa da Judeas And this is the witnessing of John, 

sendon hyra sacerdas and hyra dia- whanne lewis senten fro Jerusalem 

conas fram Jerusalem to him, ^aet hi prestis and dekenys to hym, that 



4^2 THE PRONOUN GROUP, 

aecsodon hyne and ?Jus cwae'don, Hwaet thei schulden axe him, Who art thou? 

eart ?Ju ? And he cy'Sde, and ne And he knowlechide, and denyede 

wiSsoc, and Sus cwae^, Ne eom ie not, and he knowlechide, For I am 

na Crist. And hig acsodon hine and not Crist. And thei axiden him, 

Sus cwse'don, Eart ^li Elias ? And What therfore ? art thou Elye ? 

he cwae|) Ne eom ic hit. Da cwsedon And he seide, I am not. Art thou 

hi, Eart ©li witega ? And he and- a prophete ? And he answeride, 

wyrde and cwaej), Nic' Nay.' 

St. John i. 18-21, Bosworth's Gospels. 

In Anglo-Saxon this particle was used not only for the 
simple negative, as in the above quotation, but likewise as 
our nor : and both of these uses of the particle continued 
to the fourteenth century. Thus, in the Vision of Piers the 
Ploivman, Prologue 174 : — 

' Alle |)is route of ratones • to ])is reson J?ei assented. 
Ac ])o \t belle was yboujt • and on Jje beise hanged, 
pere ne was ratou/z in alle ])e route • for alle J)e rewme of Fraunce, 
pat dorst haue ybounden Jie belle • aboute \& cattis nekke, 
Ne hangen [it] aboute J)e cattes hals • al Engelonde to wynne.' 

But the second use ( = nor) survived the other : it occurs 
repeatedly in Spenser and other writers of the sixteenth 
century. In the following quotation, from the same source 
as above, we see it in Wicliffe : — 

St. Matthew vi. 20. 
' Gold-hordiaJ) eow sojdice gold- ' But tresoure jee to 50U tresouris 
hordas on heofenan, "Sser naSor 6m in heuene, wher neither rust ne 
ne moJ)|)e hit ne fornimj), and "Sar mou3the distruyeth, and wher theues 
jjeofas hit ne delfaS, ne ne forstelaj).' deluen not out, ne stelen,' 

In Chaucer we find the ne in both senses. The following 
examples are from the Prologue : — 

ne = not. 

' He neuere yit no vilonye ne saide.' (1. 70.) 

' That no drop ne fell upon hir breste.' (1. 131.) 

'So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie.' (1. 513.) 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 4^3 

ne = nor. 

'Ne wete hir fyngres in hir sauce depe.' (1. 1 29.) 
'Ne that a monk whan he is recheles.' (1. I79-) 
'Ne was so worldly for to haue ofEce.' (1. 292.) 
'Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne.' (1. 517.) 
'Ne maked him a spiced conscience.' (1. 526.) 

ne in both senses. 
'But he ne lefte nought for rayn ne thondre.' (1. 492.) 

When ne as a simple negative had been superseded by 
?to/, it still continued in the sense of nor, and thus we find it 
in Spenser : — 

' Then mounted he upon his Steede againe, 
And with the Lady backward sought to wend. 
That path he kept which beaten was most plaine, 
Ne ever would to any byway bend, 
But still did follow one unto the end, 
The which at last out of the wood them brought. 
So forward on his way (with God to frend) 
He passed forth, and new adventure sought : 
Long way he travelled before he heard of ought.' 

The Faerie Queene, i. i. 28. 

' By them they passe, all gazing on them round, 
And to the presence mount; whose glorious view 
Their frayle amazed senses did confound : 
In living Princes court none even knew 
Such endlesse richesse, and so sumpteous shew ; 
Ne Persia selfe, the nourse of pompous pride, 
Like ever saw. And there a noble crew 
Of Lords and Ladies stood on every side, 
Which with their presence fayre the place much beautifide.' \'\ 

Id. i. 4. 7. 

Jacob Grimm would distinguish the former ne from the 
latter, writing the simple negative as ne, and the equivalent 
of *nor' as ne. This he educes' from comparison of the 
collateral forms, such as nih in Gothic for ' nor.' He thinks 
that this ne represented an older neh. The poetical quota- 
tions do not help us in this, for they show no distinction in 



4^4 ^^^ PRONOUN GROUP, 

the quantity. Neither could we get any light from the 
Saxon poetry, for it had no regulated metres. But it is 
some confirmation of Grimm's view, that the ne to which he 
gives the long vowel, outlived the other, and that it took so 
much longer time to absorb it into newer forms. This is in 
itself an argument for the probability of its having been a 
weightier syllable. 

Another form of this negative was the prefix un~, which 
has lived through the Saxon and English period without 
much change. It has always been a peculiarly expressive 
formula, and often strikingly poetical. 
ungrene. 

'Folde waes ]>a. gyt 
Grass ungrene, garsecg Jjcahte.' Caedmon, Ii6. 

The field was yet-whiles 
With grass not green; ocean covered all. 

Indeed, it is a very great factor in Anglo-Saxon. It stands 
in places where we have lost and might gladly recover its use, 
and where at present we have no better substitute than the 
unnatural device of prefixing a Latin non. 

In the Laws of Ine, we have the distinction between land- 
owners and non-landowners expressed by land dgende and 
unland dgende. 

In Chaucer and in the Ballads we meet with 'unset 
Steven ' for chance-meeting, meeting without appointment. 

Gavin Douglas, in The Palace of Honour^ written in 1501, 
ranks Dunbar among the illustrious poets, and adds that he 
is yet undead: 'Dunbar yit undeid.' 

undescribed, unset-down. 
' When they urge that God left nothing in his word " undescribed," whether 
it concerned the worship of God or outward poHty, nothing unset-down,' &c. 
— Richard Hooker, 0/ the Laws, &c.. III. xi. 8. 

unborrowed. 
* With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun.' — Gray. 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 4^5 

unchurch. 

' Our position . . . does not force us to " unchurch " (as it is termed) either 
of the other great sections of Christendom ; as they do mutually one another 
and us.' — John Keble, Life, p. 425. 

And this N-particle is not limited to the Gothic family. 
It appears in Latin ne^ non, and in-, the negative prefix so 
well known in our borrowed Latin words, as indelible, in- 
tolerable, invincible, inextinguishable, &c. In Greek it appears 
in the prefix an-, as in our borrowed Greek w^ords, anodyne, 
which cancels pain ; anonymous, which is unnamed. 

There is something strange and fascinating about this 
faculty of negation in language. It has been often asserted 
that there is nothing in speech of which the idea is not 
borrowed from the outer world. But where in the outer 
world is there such a thing as a negative ? Where is the 
natural phenomenon that would suggest to the human mind 
the idea of negation .? There are, it is true, many appearances 
that may supply types of negation to those who are in search 
of them. They who are in possession of the idea of nega- 
tion may fancy they see it in nature, in such antitheses as 
light and shade, day and night, joy and sorrow. But they 
only see a reflection of their own thought. There is no 
negative in nature. All nature is one continued series of 
affirmatives; and if this term seem too rigid, it is only 
because the very term 'affirmation' is a relative one, and 
implies negation : in other words, the expression is improper 
only because of the lack of such a foil in nature as negation 
supplies in the world of mind. Negation is a product of 
mind. The first crude hint of it is seen in the mysterious 
analogies of instinct. A horse that has put his head into his 
manger and found nothing there but chaff, gives a toss and 
a snort that are strongly suggestive of negation. This is 
a case of expectation baulked. 



425 THE PRONOUN GROUP, 

The negative in speech seems to be of this kind. Man is 
essentially a creature of special pursuits and limited aims. 
Everything in the world but that which he is at the time in 
search of is a Nay to him. Call it the smallness and narrow- 
ness of his sphere, or call it the divine, the creative, the 
purposeful, which out of the vast realm of nature carves for 
itself a route, a course, a direction — it is to this intentness of 
man that every obstacle, or even every neutral and indifferent 
thing, becomes contrasted with his momentary bent, and 
awakens the sense of a negative in his mind. 

The last great feature that rose in our path was the 
indefinite article. Nothing could be easier to understand 
how it came and what it was derived from ; indeed, it seems 
the most obvious and natural thing in the world. One 
might almost imagine it to be unavoidable. And yet it is 
a rare possession, and a peculiar feature of modern lan- 
guages. On the other hand, the negative is exceedingly 
mysterious in its nature and sources, and yet it seems to be 
common to all human speech, and to be as familiar at the 
earliest stage of primitive barbarism, as in the most cultured 
languages of the civilised world. I have never heard of 
a language that had no negative. But I have heard of native 
dialects in Australia, in which the negatives have been 
selected as the features of distinction, and have set the names 
by which the races named themselves, and were known to 
others ^ Just as the two main dialects of the Old French 

^ ' The aboriginal tribes on the western slopes of the Australian Cordillera, 
from the south of Queensland to Victoria, speak a language quite distinct 
from that of the neighbouring tribes to the east and west, whose people, in 
very rare instances indeed, are found to understand it. 

' The language itself, and these tribes, are called by themselves, and by the 
coast and more central natives, Werrageries, from their negative Werri. 
The other great family or chain of tribes to the west of them again, 
occupying the vast western lands of Australia, are designated (I have been 
told) in their turn by their peculiar negative.' 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 427 

language were distinguished by their several affirmatives, and 
were called the Langue d'oil and Lafigue d'oc. 

Negation then being a sentient product, a subjective thing 
at its very root, we ask with curiosity out of what materials its 
formula was first made. Of this I have no opinion whatever 
to offer. But of the probable history of the N-formula I will 
boldly give my own notion, not so much from confidence in 
its certainty, as for the incidental illustration which will thus 
be called out. My conjecture is that our N-particle is the 
relic of some such a word as one, or an, or any, three words 
which, as the student knows, are radically identical. I con- 
ceive that of the primitive formula of negation we know 
nothing, or only know that it has perished. Like the primi- 
tive oak, it has passed away; but it has left others instinct with 
its organism. Men are markedly emphatic in denial, and 
hence such formulas as not one, not any, not at all, not a lit, 
not a scrap, not i?i the least, &c. See how any echoes back, 
and that with an emphasis, the antecedent negative : — 

' We come back to Sir Roundell Palmer's suggestion, and repeat the 
inquiry whether a majority is never to be allowed any rights or privileges?' 
March 26, 1870. 

Hence too, in French, the pas and point, which back up the 
negation, also rie7i and aucun and jamais, and other indif- 
ferent words which by long contact with the negative, like 
steel from the company of the loadstone, have got so instinct 
with the selfsame force that they often figure as negatives 
sole. Thus,/«j" encore, point dutout ; while the other three are 
so well known as negatives, that when they stand alone they 



By the kind intervention of a friend, I have this very pertinent note from 
the pen of Mr. George Macleay, of Pendhill Court, many years resident in 
New South Wales. 

To the same friend I am also indebted for the information that the natives 
of the Pacific Islands universally designate Frenchmen as We- Wees. 



428 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

hardly are anything else. Yet none of these words possess 
by right of extraction the slightest negative signification. 
The fact seems to be that the word which is added for the 
sake of emphasis, becomes a more enduring element that 
its principal, and comes to bear the stress of the function, by 
the mere virtue of its emphasis. As in French we see but 
one or two extant relics of negation without the subjoined 
adverb, and as the subjoined adverb has in many instances 
grown into a recognised negative in its own right, so there 
is every reason to apprehend that but for the conservative 
influences of literature, the ne would have been by this time 
very much nearer to vanishing from the language than it act- 
ually is. And, had this happened, it would have been only a 
repetition of that process in which I conceive ne to have 
formerly borne the converse part of the action. Ne is 
probably the relic of some adverbial pronoun, which at first 
served a long apprenticeship under some ancient and now 
forgotten negative, of whose function it long bore the stress 
and emphasis, until at length it became the sole substitute. 

The Welsh dim, which means 'no,' 'none,' is known through 
the familiar answer Dim Saesoneg, which means * No Saxon,' 
or, 'I don't speak English.' Now this word dim etymo- 
logically is merely the word for //img. Poh means ' every,' and 
poh ddim is the Welsh for ' everything,' Thus, in modern 
Greek, the negative Sev is the relic of ohhh, ' not one ' : the 
nof has perished, and the one is now the negative. 

As a further illustration it may be added that in the 
western counties it was common thirty years ago for rustic 
arithmeticians to call the tenth cipher, the Zero or Nought, 
by the name of Ought, thus retaining only that part of the 
word which was purely affirmative by extraction. 

Nought is an abbreviation for nan-wuht, ' no-whit ' ; and 
the verbal negative not is but a more rapid form of nought. 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 4%^ 



2 . 0/ the Flexional Pronoun- A dverhs. 

Under this head come such old familiar forms as here, 

there, where, when, then, hence, whence, why, hither, whither, 

which are ancient flexional forms that sprung from adverbs 

of the substantival and adjectival classes. The tracing of 

some of these to their origin is a matter of obscure antiquity : 

others are clear ; but the enquiry belongs rather to Saxon 

than English philology. 

Then there are compounds of these, as wherethrough 

(Wisdom xix. 8). 

elsewhere. 

• Elsewhere the plebeian element of nations had risen to power through 
the arts and industries which make men rich — the Commons of Scotland 
were sons of their religion.' — J. A. Froude, History of England, February, 
1850. 

otherwhere. 

' And one hath had the vision face to face, 
And now his chair desires him here in vain, 
However they may crown him otherwhere.' 

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail. 

Space will not permit us to unravel the history of each of 
these words, and therefore we will choose one as a specimen 
for fuller treatment. This shall be the adverb-pronoun there 
and its co-flexionists. 

From the declension of that have sprung those composite 
pronouns which may be looked upon as a sort of half- 
developed new inflection of the word. 



Nom. 


that (or it) 


Gen. 


thereof 


Dat. 


thereto or therefor(e) 


Ace. 


that {or it) 


Abl. 


therefrom 


Instr. 


thereby. 



430 THE PRONOUN GROUP. 

In the following stave of the twelfth century we have 
thereby in the physical sense of by thai place : 

' Merie snngen Se muneches binnen Ely, 
Da Cnut ching rew 'Serby : 
RoweS cnites near Se lant, 
And here we "Ses muneches sang.' 

Merry sang the monks in Ely, 
As king Canute rowed thereby : 
Row ye boys nigher the land. 
And bear we these rnonhs' song. 

Therefore is used interchangeably with of it in i Kings 
vii. 27. 

The pronoun the^ which has been spoken of in a former 
section, belongs here. When we say ' so much the better/ 
this the is an instrumental case of the demonstrative that, 
and answers to the Latin eo, and is in its place here among 
the flexional adverb-pronouns. 

The first numeral has a peculiarly pronominal tendency, 
and so its flexional adverb once, when used without any 
numerical value, as in the following quotation, passes over 
from its place in the former chapter, to this present section. 

' As in those domes, where Csesars once" bore sway, 
Defac'd by time and tottering in decay. 
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, 
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed ; 
And, wondering man could want the larger pile, 
Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile,' 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller. 

Such also is our use of this word when we open a child's 
story with Once upo?i a time : it is the Latin aliquando, and 
may be compared with the provincial English somewhen. 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 43 1 



3. Of the Phrasal Pronoun- Adverls. 

As the flexional character becomes obscure, and the 
flexional signification is forgotten, symbolic words are called 
in to supplement the enfeebled adverb. Thus whence gets 
the larger {oimuia,/rom whence, as Genesis iii. 2 3 : 

Miles Coverdale, 1535. 161 1. 

' The LoRDE God put him out of ' Therefore the Lord God sent 

the garden of Eden, to tyll y^ earth, him foorth from the garden of Eden, 
whence he was taken.' to till the ground, from whence he 

was taken.' 

But more commonly a new sense is gained by the em- 
ployment of the phrasal adverb, as 

/or ever. 

' Prussians and Bavarians have fought side by side, and have equally dis- 
tinguished themselves. The Maine is bridged over for ever.' — August 4, 
1870. 

for somethi7ig. 

' Our volition counts for something, as a condition of the course of events.' 
— T. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons. 

To this section belong all such adverbial phrases as these: 
af all, at once, after all, of course, in a way, in a fashion, in a 
manner, in a sort of way, in some sort, after a sort (the two 
latter in R. Hooker, Of the Laws, I. v. 2). 

Some of these naturally develope with pecuHar luxuriance 
after negative verbs and as a complement to the negation, as 
in the following from Hugh Latimer, The Ploughers, 1549 : — 

' Whereas in deede it toucheth not monkerie, nor maketh anything at all 
for any such matter.' 

not at all. 

' Not at all considering the power of God, but puifed vp with his ten 
thousand footmen, and his thousand horsemen, and his fourescore elephants.' 
— 2 Maccabees xi. 4. 



432 



THE PRONOUN GROUP. 



The progress of modern languages, turning as it does in 
great measure upon the development of the symbolic ele- 
ment, naturally sets towards the production of grouped expres- 
sions, and this again displays itself with particular activity in 
the adverbial parts of language, whether they be presentively 
or symbolically adverbial, that is to say, whether the nounal 
or the pronounal character is prevalent. For the tendency 
of novelty is to show itself prominently in the adverbs of 
either category, just on the same principle as the extremities 
of a tree are the first to display the newest movements of 
growth. The adverbs are the tips or extremities of speech. 
Hence such adverbial phrases as the following : — 

somewhere or other. 

' He is somewhere or other in France, leading that dreary purposeless life 
which too many of our ruined countrymen are forced to lead in continental 
towns.' 

Some of the phrasal adverbs have assumed the form of 
single words, by that symphytism which naturally attaches 
these light elements to each other. Hence the forms withal^ 
however, whenever, howsoever, whensoever, whatever, neverthe- 
less, notwithstanding. 

otherwise. 

• Impossible therefore it is we should otherwise think, than that what 
things God doth neither command nor forbid, the same he permitteth with 
approbation either to be done or left undone.' — Richard Hooker, Of the 
Laws, &c., II. iv. 4. 

contrariwise. 

' Not rendring euill for euill, or railing for railing : but contrarywise 
blessing. — i Peter iii. 9. 

Upside-down is an adverb that has been altered by a 
false light from up-so-down, or, as Wiclif has it, up-se-down, 
wherein so is the old relative, and the expression is equivalent 
to up-what-down. 



i 



ADVERBIAL PRONOUNS. 433 

* He is traitour to God & tumej) J»e chirche upsedown.' — John Wiclif, 
Three Treatises, ed. J. H. Todd, Dublin, 1 851, p. 29. 

' Thus es this worlde torned up-so-downe.' 

Hampole, MS. Bowes — after Halliwell, v. Upsodoun. 

at leastwise. 

' And every effect doth after a sort contain, at leastwise resemble, the 
cause from which it proceedeth.' — Richard Hooker, Of the Laws &c. I. v. 2; 
also id. II. iv. 3. 

at no hand. 

' And in what sort did these assemble ? In the trust of ther owne know- 
ledge, or of their sharpenesse of wit, or deepenesse of iudgment, as it were in 
an arme of flesh ? At no hand. They trusted in him that hath the key of 
Dauid, opening and no man shutting ; they prayed to the Lord.' — The 
Translators to the Reader, 161 1. 

which way, that way. 

^ ' Marke which way sits the Wether-cocke, 
And that way blows the wind.' 

Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 344. 



CHAPTER IX, 



THE LINK -WORD GROUP. 

1 BORROW the title of this chapter from Mr. Thring's 
Grammar, though I somewhat vary the scope of the term 
* Link-word ' by comprising within it both prepositions and 
conjunctions. I know not of any happier term to com- 
prise that vague and flitting host of words which, starting 
forth from time to time out of the formal ranks of the 
previous parts of speech to act as the intermediaries of 
words and sentences, are commonly called Prepositions and 
Conjtinctions. 

These two parts of speech have a certain fundamental 
identity, combined with a bold divergence in which they 
appear as perfectly distinct from one another. Their dis- 
tinction is based on the definition that prepositions are used 
to attach nouns to the sentence, and conjunctions are used 
to attach sentences or to introduce them. 

The neutral ground on which they meet, and where no 
such discrimination is possible, is in the generic link -words 
and, or, also, for, but. 



PREPOSITIONS. 435 

I. Of Prepositions. 
The preposition may be defined as a word that expresses 
the relation of a noun to its governing word. A few ex- 
amples must suffice for the illustration of a class of words so 
familiarly known and so various in their shades of significa- 
tion. The examples will be mostly of the less common uses, 
as we shall consider the common uses to be present to the 
mind of the reader; the object being to suggest to the 
reader's mind the almost endless variety of shades of which 
prepositions are susceptible. First, the prepositions of the 
simpler and mostly elder sort. 

af/er. 
' Full semyly aftir hir mete she raughte.' 
f Prologue, [36. 

' The vintners were made to pay licence duties after a much higher scale 
than that which had obtained under Ralegh.' — Edward Edwards, Ralegh 
(1868), ii. p. 23. 

by. 

' But say by me as I by thee, 
I fancie none but thee alone.' 

Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 244. 

' I will do the right thing by him.' 

Or, as Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ch. v. 

' I think he will consider it a right thing by Mrs. Grant as well as by 
Fanny.' 

Where we should now say ' as regards Mrs. Grant,' or ' as 
far as Fanny is concerned.* 

By having originally meant aboutj acquired in various 
localities, notably in Shropshire, a power of indicating the 
knowledge of something bad about any person, insomuch 
that * I know nowt by him ' is provincially used for ' I know 
no harm of him/ And it is according to this idiom that our 
version makes St. Paul witness of himself, ' I know nothing 
F f 2 



43^ THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

by myself, yet am I not hereby justified ' : and the expression 
occurs more than once in the curious book from which the 
following is quoted : — 

' Then I was committed to a darke dungeon fifteene dayes, which time 
they secretly made enquiry where I had lyen before, what my wordes and 
behauiour had beene while I was there, but they could find nothing by me.' 
— Webbe, his trauailes, 1 590. 

This preposition is now mostly used as the instrument of 
passivity : — 

' It is not unqualifiedly true that the rose would smell as sweet by any 
other name, — at least not the doctrine which that famous expression is used 
to assert. We do feel the pleasure enhanced when, in a beautiful spot, we 
find that that spot has been the theme of praise by men of taste in many 
generations.' — H. C. Robinson, Diary, 1 83 7. 

but. 

' But (on this day) let sea-men feare no wracke ' 

Shakspeare, King John, iii. I. 92, 

where the parentheses have the unusual signification of 
throwing the enclosed words into a composite lump to make 
a noun under the government of the preposition outside. It 
is equivalent to ' except on-this-day.' 

' And who but Rumour, who but onely I.' 

2 Henry IV, Induction, 1. 11. 

/or. 

' Ye shal be slayne in all the coastes of Israel, I wil be avenged of you : 
to lerne you for to knowe, that I am the Lorde.' — Ezechiel xi. 10. (1535). 

' If wee will descend to later times, wee shall finde many the like examples 
of such kind, or rather vnkind acceptance. The first Romane Emperour did 
neuer doe a more pleasing deed to the learned, nor more profitable to pos- 
teritie, for conseruing the record of times in true supputation ; then when he 
corrected the Calender, and ordered the yeere according to the course of the 
Sunne : and yet this was imputed to him for noueltie, and arrogancie, and 
procured to him great obloquie. So the first Christened Emperour (at the 
leastwise that openly professed the faith himselfe, and allowed others to doe 
ihe like) for strengthening the Empire at his great charges, and prouiding for 
the Church, as he did, got for his labour the name Pupillus, as who would 
say, a wastefull Prince, that had neede of a Guardian, or ouerseer. So the 



PREPOSITIONS. 437 

best Christened Emperour, for the loue that he bare vnto peace, thereby to 
enrich both himselfe and his subiects, and because he did not seeke warre 
but find it, was iudged to be no man at armes, (though in deed he excelled in 
feites of chiualrie, and shewed so much when he was prouoked) and con- 
demned for giuing himselfe to his ease, and to his pleasure.' — The Trans- 
lators to the Reader, l6ll. 



' Out of that great past he brought some of the sterner stuff of which the 
martyrs were made, and introduced it like iron into the blood of modern 
religious feeling.' — J. C. Shairp, John Kehle, 1866. 

Of is the most frequent preposition in the English lan- 
guage. Probably it occurs as often as all the other prepo- 
sitions put together. It is a characteristic feature of the 
stage of the language which we call by distinction English, 
as opposed to Saxon. And this character, Hke so many 
characters really distinctive of the modern language, is 
French. Nine times out often that ^is used in English it 
represents the French de. It is the French preposition in a 
Saxon mask. The word 0/ is Saxon, if by ^ word ' we under- 
stand the two letters andy, or the sound they make when 
pronounced together. But if we mean the function which 
that httle sound discharges in the economy of the language, 
then the ' word ' is French at least nine times out of ten. 

Where the Saxon of was used, we should now mostly 
employ another preposition, as 

' Alys us of yfle.' 
Deliver us from evil. 

The following from the Saxon Chronicle, a.d. 894, shows 
one place where we should retain it, and one where we 
should change it : — 

* Ne com se here oftor call ute of ' The host came not all out of 

psem setum Jjonne tuwwa. o}>re si])e the encampment oftener than twice : 

J)a hie arest to londe comon. ser once when they first to land came, 

sio fierd gesamnod wsere. o])re si]>e ere the ' fierd ' was assembled : once 

|)a hie of psem setum faran wol- when they would depart from the 

don,' encampment.' 



438 THE LINK- WORD GROUP, 

Thus the Saxon 0/ has to be sought with some care by 
him who would find it in modern English. Those of the 
current type, such as are illustrated in the following quota- 
tion, are French : — 

' Thus it has come to pass that women have, by change to times of set- 
tled peace, and by the reformation of religion, lost something of dignity, of 
usefulness, and of resources.' — John Boyd-Kinnear, Woman s Work, p. 352. 

Numerous as are the places in which this preposition now 
occurs, it is less rife than it was. In the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries the language teemed with it. It recurred 
and recurred to satiety. This Frenchism is now much 
abated. I will add a few examples in which we should no 
longer use it. 

'Paul after his shipwreck is kindly entertained of the barbarians.' — Ads 
xxviii. (Contents.) 

' I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am appre- 
hended of Christ lesus.' — Phil. iii. 12. 

This ^ as the instrument of passivity has been displaced, 
and 5y has been substituted in its stead. 

' How shall I feast him ? What bestow of him.' 

Twelfth Night, iii. 4. 2. 

' What time the Shepheard, blowing of his nailes.' 

3 Henry VI. ii. 5. 3. 

' Doe me the favour to dilate at full, 
What haue befalne of them and thee till now.' 

Comedy of Errors, i. i. 124. 

In the Fourth Folio this last ^is at length omitted. 

' Solomon was greater than Dauid, though not in vertue, yet in power : 
and by his power and wisdome he built a Temple to the Lord, such a one 
as was the glory of the land of Israel, and the wonder of the whole world. 
But was that his magnificence liked of by all ? ' — The Translators to the 
Reader, 161 1. 



PREPOSITIONS. 439 

Off is now little used prepositionally ; it has become a 
separate word, appropriate to a peculiar set of what we must 
call adverbial uses, as be off, take off, wash off, write off, 
they who are far off, &c. But this is a modern distinction, 
and it exhibits one of the devices of language for increasing 
its copia verhorum. Any mere variety of spelling may acquire 
distinct functions to the enrichment of speech. 

In Miles Coverdale's Bible (1535) there is no distinction 
between ^"and off ; as may be seen by the following from 
the thirteenth chapter of the prophet Zachary : — 

' In that tyme shall the house off Dauid, and the citesyns off lerusalem 
haue an open well, to wash of synne and vnclennesse. And then (sayeth the 
LoRDE off hoostes) I will destroye the names of Idols out off the londe.' 



' In a series of Acts i)assed over the veto of the President, Congress pro- 
vided for the assemblage in each Southern State of a constituent Convention, 
to be elected by universal suffrage, subject to the disfranchisement of all 
persons who had taken an active part in the civil or military services of the 
Confederacy.' 

Till is from an ancient substantive til, still flourishing in 
German in its rightful form as jiel, and meaning goal, mark, 
aim, butt. Thus in some Saxon versified proverbs, printed 
in the Introduction to my Saxon Chronicles, p. xxxv : — 

' Til sceal on eSle 
domes wyrcean.' 

Mark shall on patrimony 
doom-wards work. 

i. e. a borne or landmark shall be admissible as evidence. 

The preposition is now appropriated to Time : we say till 

then, till to-morrow ; but not till there, &c. Earlier it was 

used of Place, as in Shakspeare's Passionate Pilgrim : — 

' She, poor bird, as all forlorn 
Lean'd her breast up till a thorn, 
And there gan the dolefull'st ditty, 
That to hear it was great pity.' 



440 THE LINK- WORD GROUP, 

to { = comparable to). 

' A sweet thing is love, 

It rules both heart and mind ; 
There is no comfort in the world 
To women that are kind.' 

Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 320. 

Up07t. 
' There were slaine of them, vpon a three thousand men.' — i Maccabees iv. 
15- 

without. 

' But now what pietie without trueth ? what trueth (what sauing trueth) 
without the word of God ? what word of God (whereof we may be sure) 
without the Scripture?' — The Translators to the Reader^ 161 1. 

The prepositions are more elevated in the scale of sym- 
bolism than the pronouns. They are quite removed from 
all appearance of direct relation with the material and the 
sensible. They constitute a mental product of the most 
exquisite sort. They are more cognate to mind ; they have 
caught more of that freedom which is the heritage of mind ; 
they are more amenable to mental variations, and more ready 
to lend themselves to new turns of thought, than pronouns 
can possibly be. To see this it is necessary to stand outside 
the language ; for these things have become so mingled with 
the very circulation of our blood, that we cannot easily put 
ourselves in a position to observe them. Those who have 
mastered, or in any effective manner even studied Greek, 
will recognise what is meant. To see it in our own speech 
requires more practised habits of observation. But here 
I can avail myself of testimony. Wordsworth had the art of 
bringing into play the subtle powers of English prepositions, 
and this feature of his poetry has not escaped the notice of 
Principal Shairp. In his Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, 
when speaking of Wordsworth, he says : — ' Here, in pass- 
ing, I may note the strange power there is in his simple 



PREPOSITIONS. 441 

prepositions. The star is on the mountain-top; the silence is in 
the starry sky ; the sleep is among the hills ; the gentleness of 
heaven is on the sea — not " broods o'er," as the later editions 
have it.' (p. 74.) 

Wordsworth dedicated his Memorials of a Tour in Italy to 
his fellow-traveller, Henry Crabb Robinson. The opening 
lines are : — 

' Companion ! by whose buoyant spirit cheered, 
In whose experience trusting, day by day.' 

It was originally written ' To whose experience,' &c. Mr. 
Robinson suggested that ' In ' would be better than ' To,' 
and the poet, after offering reasons for a thing which can 
hardly be argued upon, ended by yielding his own superior 
sense to the criticism of his friend. [Diary, 1837.) 

A second series of prepositions are those in which flexion 
is traceable, especially the genitival form, as against, besides, 
si thence, &c. 

besides ( = without, or contrary to). 

' Besides all men's expectation.' — Richard Hooker, Of the Laws Sec. 
Preface, ii. 6. 

* Which Scripture being given to teach matters of belief not less than of 
action, the Fathers must needs be and are even as plain against credit besides 
the relation, as against practice without the injunction of Scripture.' — Id. 
Bk. II. V. 3. 

sithence. 

' We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole 
earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered 
by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the 
blessed Apostles were here conversant.' — Richard Hooker, Of the Laws, &c. 
Preface, iv. i. 

;zmr (comparative of ;zz^/^). 

' The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew 
Near that bituminous lake where Sodom fiam'd.' 

Paradise Lost, x. 562. 



44^ THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

next (superlative). 

' Happy the man whom this bright Court approves, 
His sov'reign favours, and his Country loves, 
Happy next him, who to these shades retires.' 

Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest, 335. 

Perhaps we ought to range in this series such a preposi- 
tion as save, which having come to us through the French 
sauf, from the Latin salvo, is still, at least to the perceptions 
of the scholar, redolent of the ablative absolute. 



' In one of the public areas of the town of Como stands a statue with no 
inscription on its pedestal, save that of a single name, volta.' — John Tyn- 
dall, Faraday as a Discoverer. 

A third series of prepositions, consisting of more than one 
word, are the phrasal prepositions. In the development of 
this sort of preposition, we have been expedited by French 
tuition. A constant and necessary element in their forma- 
tion is the preposition of. They are the analogues of such 
French prepositions as aupres de, autour de, &c. 

long of; along of. 

' All long of this vile Traitor Somerset.' 

I Henry VI. iv. 3. 33. 

* Long all of Somerset, and his delay,' Ibid. 46. 

An older form of this preposition was long on or along on, 
as it is still frequently heard in country places. The French 
^prevailed over the native on, as it did also in some other 
positions. Chaucer has 

' I can not tell whereon it was along. 
But wel I wot gret stryf is us among,' 

Canones Yemannes Tale. 



PREPOSITIONS. 443 

in spight of; in spite of. 

' As on a Mountaine top the Cedar shewes, 
That keepes his leaues in spight of any storme.' 

2 Henry VI. v. i. 206. 

in presence of (French en presence de). 

' The object of this essay is not religious edification, but the true criticism 
of a great and misunderstood author. Yet it is impossible to be in presence 
of this Pauline conception of faith without remarking on the incomparable 
power of edification which it contains.' — Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and 
Protestantism, p. 135. 

for — sake (with genitive between). 

' Now for the comfortless troubles' sake of the needy.' — Psalm xii. 5 
(Elder version). 

' But if any man say vnto you, This is offered in sacrifice vnto idoles, eate 
not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake.' — i Cor. x. 28. 

' For Sabrine bright her only sake.' 

Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 386. 

This is the formula throughout the English Bible, and 
throughout Shakspeare with three exceptions, according to 
Mrs. Cowden Clarke. In the above examples, troubles, his, 
conscience are in the genitive case. The s genitival is not 
added to conscience, because it ends with a sibilant sound, 
and where there are two sibilants already, a third could 
hardly be articulated. The s of the genitive case is, how- 
ever, often absent where this reason cannot be assigned. 
Thus : — 

' For his oath sake.' — Twelfth Night, iii. 4. 
' For fashion sake.' — As You Like It, iii. 2. 

• For sport sake.' — I Henry IV. ii. I. 
' For their credit sake.' — Id. ii. i. 

' For safety sake.' — Id. v. i. 

* But for your health and your digestion sake.' 

Troilus and Cressida, ii. 3. 



444 THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

Instead of this genitive, however, the present use of the lan- 
guage substitutes an ^form, which occurs in Shakspeare 
three times : — 

for the sake of. 

' And for the sake of them thou sorrowest for. 

Comedie of Errors, i. I. 12 2. 

' If for the sake of Merit thou wih heare mee.' 

Anthony and Cleopatra, ii. 7. 54. 

' A little Daughter, for the sake of it 
Be manly, and take comfort.' Pericles, iii. i. 21. 

This class of prepositions is useful as letting us see how 
the older prepositions came into their place, and (to speak 
generally) how the symbolic element sustains itself and pre- 
serves itself from the natural decay of inanition. Here is a 
presentive word enclosed between two prepositions, as if it 
had been swallowed by them, and gradually undergoing the 
process of assimilation. By and bye the substantive becomes 
obsolete elsewhere, and lives on here in a preposition, with 
a purely symbolic power. For instance, none but scholars 
can see anything but a preposition in such a case as 
instead of. 

II. Of Conjunctions. 

Of all the parts of speech the conjunction comes last in 
the order of nature. As the office of the conjunction is to 
join sentences together, it presupposes the completion of the 
simple sentence ; and as a consequence, it would seem to 
imply the pre- existence of the other parts of speech, and to 
be the terminal product of them all. It is essentially a sym- 
bolic word, but this does not hinder it from comprising 
within its vocabulary a great deal of half-assimilated pre- 



CONJ UNCTIONS. 445 

sentive matter. This is a point which will have to be further 
noticed in the course of the chapter. 

The necessity for conjunctions (other than 'and, or) does 
not arise until language has advanced to the formation of 
compound sentences. Hence the conjunctions are as a 
whole a comparatively modern formation. Here we have 
not an array of short and ancient and obscure examples, 
as in the case of the prepositions. Almost all the conjunc- 
tions are recent enough for us to know of what they were 
made. And indeed they may conveniently be divided accord- 
ing to the parts of speech out of which they have been 
formed. 

Of the derival of a conjunction from a preposition, we 
have a ready instance in the old familiar hut, at first a pre- 
position and compounded of two earlier prepositions, 
namely, by and out ; in Saxon butan, from be and utan. 

Others of the same character are 

for. 

' For thou, for thou didst view, 
That death of deaths, companion true.' 

till. 

' As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not 
know till he takes up the pen to write, so the heart is a secret even to him 
(or her) who has it in his own breast.' — W. M. Thackeray, Esmond, Bk. II. 
ch. i. 

until. 

' Shakspeare was quite out of fashion until Steele brought him back into 
the mode.' — W. M. Thackeray, Esmond, Bk. 11. ch. x. 

'No character is natural until it has been proved to be so.' — W. S. 
Macleay, quoted by Professor Rolleston, Forms of Animal Life, p. xxi. 

Then there are conjunctions formed by the symphytism 
of a preposition with a noun, as in the Shakspearian belike, 
which is pure English, or per adventure, which is pure French, 
or perhaps, which is half French and half Danish. 



44^ THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

peradventure. 

' Some peraduenture would haue no varietie of sences to be set in the 
margine, lest the authoritie of the Scriptures for deciding of controuersies by 
that show of vncertaintie, should somewhat be shaken.' — The Translators to 
the Reader, i6ii. 

In Chaucer, Knight's Tale, 2488, we find the full phrase 
out of which has been made the compressed form 

because. 

'But by the cause that they sholde ryse ' Bot be ])e cause |;at Jjei scholde rise 
Eerly for to seen the grete fight Erly for to seen \)e. grete fighte 

Vn to hir reste wenten they at night.' Vnto her reste went ]/ei,att nihte.' 
Ellesmere MS. Lansdowne MS. 

A conjunction formed from the reference of a preposition 
to a foregoing adverb, is 

too . . , to. 

' I have seen too much of success in life to take off my hat and huzza to 
it as it passes in its gilt coach.' — ^W. M. Thackeray, Esmond, Bk. I. p. 30. 

But the great source of conjunctions is the pronoun. 
Here the ancient relative pronoun so is one of the most fre- 
quent factors, not only in its own form but likewise in also ; 
and in as, which is shortened from an elder form of ' also,' 
namely ealswa, i. e. ' entirely, altogether so,' ' quite in that 
manner.' 

In the following line of Chaucer, Prologue 92, we see 
the after as already mature, while the fore one is still in the 
course of formation. We see al and so in various stages of 
approximation until their final coalition in the form of as. 
By means of Mr. FurnivalFs Six-Text Print we have the 
comparison of the manuscripts ready to our hand : — 

' He was al so fresche as is \& mone]) of Mai.' 

Lansdowne MS, 

'He was also fressh as ys )>e moneth of May.' 

Petworth MS, 



CONJUNCTIONS. 447 

' He was als freissch as is |)e monj) of May.' 

Corpus MS. 

' He was as frosch as is the monyth of May.' 

Cambridge MS. 



' The volume of a gas increases as its temperature is raised, and decreases 
as the temperature is lowered.' 

as — as and as. 

' The only kind of faith which is inseparable from life is a divine convic- 
tion of truth imparted to the intellect through the heart, and which becomes 
as absolute to the internal conscience as one's existence, and as incapable of 
proof.' — Laurence Oliphant, Piccadilly, p. 275. 

So and as frequently make up a conjunction by their 
combined action, when if we were to consider them apart, 
each by itself, we should be forced to call them adverbial 
pronouns ; and it is by their inherent capacity of standing to 
each other as antecedent and relative, that they together 
constitute a conjunction. 

as — so and so. 

' As great men flatter themselves, so they are flattered by others, and so 
robbed of the true judgment of themselves.' — R. Sibbes, Soul's Conflict, 
ch. xiv. 



* With a depth so great as to make it a day's march from the rear to the 
ran, and a front so narrow as to consist of one gun and t)ne horseman.' — 
A. W. Kinglake, Invasion of the Crimea, vol. iii. ch. ix. 

The use of as for a conjunction- sole is now disallowed, 
and is in fact one of our standard vulgarisms. It is seen in 
the familiar saw, ' Handsome is as handsome does.' Yet 
this use occurs in the Spectator, No. 508 — in the course of 
a correspondent's letter it is true, but the correspondent is 
a young lady, and writes like one : — 

' Is it suflferable, that the Fop of whom I complain should say, as he 
would rather have such-a-one without a Groat, than me with the Indies ? ' 



44o THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

SO — f/iaf. 

' One is so near to another that no air can come between them.' — Job 
xli. 1 6. 

' Rich young men become so valuable a prize that selection is renounced,' 
, — John Boyd-Kinnear, Woman's Work, p. 353. 

/hen or /kan. 

' A wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will 
do of sacred Scripture.' — John Milton, Areopagitica. 

where or whereas. 

' Where in former times the only remedy for misgovernment real or sup- 
posed was a change of dynasty, the evil is now corrected at no greater cost 
than that of a ministerial crisis. Where in former times serious evils were 
endured because the remedy was worse than the disease, trivial incon- 
veniences now excite universal complaints and meet with speedy remedy. 
Where formerly ministers clung to office with the tenacity of despair, and 
rival statesmen persecuted each other to the death, the defeated premier 
now retires with the reasonable prospect of securing by care and skill a 
triumphant return ; and both he and his successors mutually entertain no 
other feelings than those to which an honourable rivalry may give rise. 
Where formerly every subsidy was the occasion of the bitterest contention, 
and was given at last grudgingly and with mistrust, the House of Commons 
has never since the Revolution refused to the Crown the maintenance of a 
single soldier or reduced the salary of a single clerk.' — W. E. Hearn, The 
Government of England, 1867, p. 126. 

Whether. This interesting word is a substantive-pro- 
noun in such passages as 

' Whether of them twaine did the will of his father ? They say vnto him, 
The first.' — Matthew xxi. 31. 

' Whether is greater, the gold, or the Temple ?' — Id. xxiii. 17. 

But this pronominal use is now antiquated, and whether is 
used only as a conjunction : — 

' Whether they wil heare, or whether they will forbeare.' — Ezekiel ii. 5. 
' Whether it were I or they.' — i Cor. xv. il. 

To this same group belongs a conjunction, not so common 
as it once was, but one that has a fine old English ring with 



CONJUNCTIONS. 449 

it, albeit a translation from the French. We mean the /low 
before narratives, or the summary of a narrative, as in the 
heading of chapters. It comes from the age of chivalry ; 
almost every chapter in Froissart begins with Coviment. 
Nor has it quite lost the romantic character. Sometimes 
it has a sort of archness about it, as if it would prepare the 
reader for something droll : — 

^ ' I have related how an eminent physicist with whose acquaintance I am 
honoured, imagines me to have invented the author of the Sacra Privata ; 
and that fashionable newspaper, the Morning Post, undertaking — as I seemed, 
it said, very anxious about the matter — to supply information as to who 
the author really was, laid it down that he was Bishop of Calcutta, and that 
his ideas and writings, to which I attached so much value, had been among 
the main provocatives of the Indian mutiny.'^Matthew Arnold, St. Paul 
and Protestantism, Y>. 'J^. 

There are also of this group that run into phrasal for- 
mulae, as — 

for all thai. 

' Yet for all that it cannot be dissembled, that partly to exercise and whet 
our wits, partly to weane the curious from loathing of them for their 
euerywhere-plainenesse, partly also to stirre vp our deuotion to craue the 
assistance of Gods spirit by prayer, and lastly, that we might be forward to 
seek ayd of our brethren by conference, and neuer scorn those that be not 
in all respects so complete as they should bee, being to seeke in many 
things our selues, it hath pleased God in his diuine prouidence, heere and 
there to scatter wordes and sentences of that difEcultie and doubtfulnesse,' 
&c. — The Translators to the Reader, 161 1. 

Of all the elements that go to make conjunctions, none 
come near the pronouns in importance. Often where other 
parts of speech get a footing in this office, it has been by 
pronominal ushering. Thus, in the case of directly, quoted 
below, it is clear that this word originally came in as an 
adverb to a pronominal conjunction : it was at first ' directly 
as ' or ' directly that/ 

Of the conjunctions which are of pronominal extraction 
the so and the as are our Saxon inheritance, whereas the con- 
junctional use of who, whose, whom, which, what, whence, &c., 



450 THE LINK-WORD GROUP. 

are French imitations. In the Latin language, and in those 
which spring from it, the relative pronoun is the chief 
conjunction. In French, for example, ^ui and gue play a 
part which their equivalents in English do not come near. 
Indeed, the degree in which these relatives act as conjunc- 
tions is almost the touchstone of a Latinised or Frenchified 
style. For the Latin scholar, one has only to name a few 
of such sentence -links as the following : qucs quum ita smf, 
quo facto, quihus peractis, quod si, quare, quoin or quum, &c. 

For a French instance, I quote the following example 
from Pere Lacordaire, Quarantieme Conference, with the 
anonymous translation as published by Chapman and Hall, 
1869:— 

' Vous ne fonderez done pas une doctrine, eussiez-vous devant vous mille 
ans multiplies par mille ans. Que si vous sortez des principes de I'incre- 
dulit^, a I'instant meme vous retombez en Jesus-Christ, le seul maitre 
possible de quiconque reconnait une autorite.' 

' You would not then found a doctrine, even if you had a thousand years 
multiplied by another thousand before you. If you quit the principles of 
unbelief, at that very moment you fall back upon Jesus Christ, the only 
possible master for whosoever acknowledges an authority.' 

Although this translation is almost in the extreme of 
verbal fidelity, yet the Que is passed over in silence. And 
rightly so. 

As we turned who and which from interrogatives into 
relatives under French influence, as already shewn, so it 
followed that these words took a place also as conjunctions, 
just as the French qui and que do. Moreover, we accepted 
also the symbol-cases of these words as conjunctions, 
namely, of whom, in which, &c, and we said, ' There is the 
man to whom I sent you,' ' This is the thing of which I 
spoke ' ; instead of * The man I sent you to,' ' The thing 
1 spoke of.' This Romanesque form of speech was well- 
established among us in the seventeenth century, and it still 



CONJUNCTIONS. 45 1 

retains its place, though there has been a reaction, which 
Addison has the credit of. 

It often happens that when foreign idioms are admitted 
into a language, they make awkward combinations with the 
native material, at least in unskilled hands. So this relative 
conjunction is always getting into trouble. It is much com- 
plained of that even the correspondents of first-class news- 
papers will write ' and which,' ' and where,' &c., inappro- 
priately. Of course there is a position in which such 
expressions would be unimpeachable. If two clauses, each 
of them beginning with which ^ have to be combined by mid^ 
the second clause will necessarily begin with and which. 
But this will not justify examples like the following, drawn 
from the Bath Chronicle, where the subject has been recently 
noticed : — 

' The Oxford correspondent of the Standard, in his letter of Saturday, 
writes — " In the afternoon the Flower Show will be held in the gardens of 
Worcester College, afid at which the band of the Coldstreams will assist;" 
and again, " At night Miss Neilson, the well-known actress, and who has 
obtained in a very short time a considerable reputation as a reader, will give 
a dramatic reading from the Ingoldsby Legends, Tennyson, &c., in the 
Clarendon-rooms, and where one may expect a crowded audience." In 
yesterday's paper he writes, " Then again parties without number were 
lionising, &c. &c., while some went to see an assault of arms conducted by 
Mr. Blake, at the Holywell Concert-room, and where Mr. Buller, of the 
Guards, exhibited some feats, &c. &c," ' 

Conjunctions from adverbs : — 

er, or, ere (Saxon cer), 

' Forsaketh sinne or sinne you forsake.' 

Canterbury Tales, 12,220. 

' There are two kinds of biographies, and of each kind we have seen 
examples in our own time. One is as a golden chaHce, held up by some wise 
hand, to gather the earthly memory ere it is spilt on the ground. The other 
is as a millstone, hung by partial yet ill-judging friend, round the hero's 
neck to plunge him as deep as possible in oblivion.' — J. C. Shairp, John 
Kehle, p. 69. 

Gg 2 



4^2 ^^^-E LINK-WORD GROUP. 

This old conjunction is often strengthened by the addition 

of ever : — 

' And the Lyons had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in 
pieces or euer they came at the bottome of the den.' — Daniel vi. 24. 

Sometimes two forms of the same word were combined, as 

or ere. 
' Two long dayes journey (Lords) or ere we meete.' 

Shakspeare, King John, iv. 3. 20. 

nevertheless. 

' I cannot fully answer this or that objection, nevertheless I will persevere 
in beUeving.' — J. Llewelyn Davies, The Gospel and Modern Life, p. xiv. 

dzreclly. 

' On the contrary, is it not the case that everybody and every section are 
telling us continually that the religious difficulty, directly you come to 
practice, becomes insignificant, and that it is a difficulty made rather for 
Parliament and for debate than one which would be raised within the 
schools ?' — House of Commons, June 25, 1870. 

Just. 

■' Just as the confusion of tongues thwarted the bold attempt which men 
once made to ascend the heavens, so a confusion of ideas seems to wait 
upon all attempts to build up theories with reference to those dealings of 
God with man, for which Scripture affords no sufficient materials.' — Scrip- 
ture Revelations [J. W. Flower, Esq.] i860, p. 338. 

Conjunctions from adjectives : — 

kasf, modern lest. 

' Lastly, followers are not to be liked, least while a man maketh his 
traine longer, he maketh his winges shorter.' — Bacon's Essays, ed. W. Aldis 
Wright, p. 275. 

no more than. 

This is now little more than an illustrative way of saying 
not at all. But it once had its literal and quantitative sig- 
nification : — 

'So bote he loved that by nightertale 
He slep no more then doth the nightingale.' 

Chaucer's Prologue, 98. 



CONJUNCTIONS. 453 

The idea here is not that he watched all night, but that he 
was a short sleeper. 

Conjunctions formed from nouns : — as wh'k, the old 
substantive for ' time/ 

' But, while his province is the reasoning part, 
Has still a veil of midnight on his heart.' 

William Cowper. 

7^/iaf time as. 

• Thou calledst upon me in troubles, and I delivered thee : and heard thee 
what time as the storm fell upon thee.' — Psalm Ixxxi. 7, elder version. 

Si'/k is an old substantive for 'journey/ 'road/ 'turn': 
it is used as a conjunction in Ezechiel xxxv. 6, and not again 
in the text of our Bible : — 

' Being iustified by faith, wee haue peace with God, and ioy in our hope., 
that sith we were reconciled by his blood, when wee were enemies, wee 
shall much more be saued being reconciled.' — Romans v. Contents. 

It occurs five times in the First Book of Hooker, Of the 
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity^ as appears by the Glossary to 
Mr. Church's edition. 

Conjunctions formed from verbs, or containing verbs in 
their composition. The first place here is claimed by the 
old familiar if Saxon gif imperative of the verb gifan, to 
give. 

i- ' Ac gif ic haefde swilcne anweald, swilce se aelmihtega God hsef}) ; "Sonne 
ne lete ic no Sa yfelan derian "Sam godum swa swij)e swa hi nu do]?.' — 
King Alfred's Boethius, ed. Cardale, p. 304. 

But if I had such power as the Almighty God has; then would not I let 
the evil hurt the good so much as they now do. 

Home Tooke says that an in such expressions as ' An it 
please your honour,' is the imperative of the Saxon verb 
unnan, to grant. " I doubt the explanation; but as I cannot 
disprove it, I place the word here. For my. own part I 



454 I'HE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

would as lief think it merely a special habit of the common 
and, and we know it was often written so. 

' And my will is that xii pore men and they may be gete have xii gownes,' 
&c. — The Will of Dame Jane Lady Barre, 1484, in A Memoir of the Ma?ior 
of Bitton, by the Rev, H. T. Ellacombe, formerly Vicar of Bitton. 

howbeif, notwithstanding. 

' Howbeit (as evermore the simpler sort are, even w^hen they see no ap- 
parent cause, jealous notwithstanding over the secret intents and purposes of 
wiser men) this proposition of his did somewhat trouble them.' — Richard 
Hooker, Of the Laws, &c., Preface, ch. ii. 

seeing. 

' And one morn it chanced 
He found her in among the garden yews, 
And said, " Delay no longer, speak your wish, 
Seeing I must go to-day." ' Idylls of the King. 

according. 
' Their abominations were according as they loved. — Hosea ix. 10. 

talk of. 

'Talk of the privileges of the Peerage, of Members' exemption from the 
Eighth Commandment, of the separate jurisdiction secured on the Continent 
to soldiers, what are they all put together to a privilege like this ? ' 

depend upon it. 

' Depend upon it, a good deal is lost by not looking round the corner.' — 
Mrs. Prosser, Quality Fogg's Lost Ledger. 

When a sentence is opened with IVo doubt, this seems to 
claim a place among these verbal conjunctions, being a 
condensed expression for ' There is no doubt that.' It has,- 
however, a less emphatic burden than would be conveyed by 
the latter formula : — 

' No doubt a determined effort would be made by many of those who are 
now engaged in these occupations, to prevent the admission of females to 
them, and to keep up the monopoly of sex.' — Frederic Hill, Crime. : its 
Amoufit, Causes, and Remedies, 1853, p. 86. 

Here it may be objected — Do you call these ivords sym- 
bolic .^ What does ' presentive ' mean, if such words as see, 



CONJUNCTIONS. 455 

talk, depend, doubt, are not presentive ? In what sense can 
these belong to a group which is called essentially symbolic ? 
This very contradiction troubled the author of Hermes, 
a famous book on universal grammar, which was published 
in 1 75 1. He had pitched upon the distinction of presentive 
and symbolic as the fundamental and essential distinction 
of his universal grammar. He did not, indeed, use the terms ; 
but he spoke of v/ords as (i) significant by themselves, or 
significant absolutely, and (2) significant by association, 
or significant relatively. When he treats of conjunctions, 
he regards them as belonging to the second class, and yet 
he cannot shut his eyes to certain refractory instances. The 
embarrassment of James Harris on this occasion became 
the sport of Home Tooke, who published his Divej'sions of 
Purley in 1786. In his saucy manner he sums up the 
doctrine of the Hermes as follows : — 

' Thus is the conjunction explained by Mr. Harris ; 
A sound significant devoid of signification, 
Having at the same time a kind of oh&cure signification ; 
And yet having neither signification nor no signification, 
Shewing the attributes both of signification and no signification ; 
And linking sigiiification and no signification together.' 

Diversions of Ptirley, Part I. ch. vii. 

This is of course a caricature, and we only avail ourselves 
of its exaggerated features, in order to raise up before us in 
bolder reHef the difficulty which we are here confronting. 

The solution seemxS to be this : — That the essential nature 
of a conjunction (or of any other organic member of speech) 
discovers itself, not in the recent examples of the class, but 
in those which have by long use been purged of accidental 
elements. This will be clearer by an illustration drawn 
from familiar experience. 

It is well known that many words in common use are 
masked, that they do not express plainly the sense which 



45^ THE LINK- WORD GROUP, 

they are notwithstanding intended to convey. We do not 
always call a spade a spade. We have recourse in certain 
well-known cases to forms of expression as distant from the 
thing meant as is any way consistent with the intention of 
being understood. In such cases it will have struck every 
philological observer that it becomes necessary from time 
to time to replace these makeshifts with others of new device. 
In fact, words used to convey a veiled meaning are found 
to wear out very rapidly. The real thought pierces through ; 
they soon stand declared for what they are, and not for what 
they half feign to be. Words gradually drop the non- 
essential, and display the pure essence of their nature. And 
the real nature of a word is to be found in the thought which 
is at the bottom of its motive. As we know full well how 
this nature pierces through all disguise, casts off all drapery 
and pretext and colour, and in the course of time stands 
forth as the name of that thing which was to be ignored 
even while it was indicated, so in the case now before us. 

There are reasons why the speaker is not satisfied with 
the old conjunctions, and he brings forward words with 
more body and colour to reinforce the old conjunctions or 
to stand as conjunctions alone. If these words continue for 
any length of time to be used as conjunctions, the presentive 
matter which now lends them colour will evaporate, and 
they will become purely symbolic. Of this we may be sure 
from the experience of the elder examples. Who now 
thinks of if as an imperative verb ? Even in such a con- 
junction as because, where the presentive matter is still very 
plain, it has, generally speaking, no existence to the mind 
of the speaker. 

It is not indeed a singular quality in the conjunction, 
that being itself essentially symbolic, it should receive acces- 
sions from the presentive groups. This is seen also in the 



CONJUNCTIONS. 457 

pronoun and in the preposition, and it is only as a matter 
of degree that the conjunction is remarkable in this respect. 
As far as observation reaches, the symbolic element is every- 
where sustained by new accessions from the presentive, and 
it is worthy of note that the extreme symbolic word, the con- 
junction, which is chiefly supplied from groups of words 
previously symbolic, seems to be the one which most eagerly 
welcomes presentive material, as if desirous to recruit itself 
after its too great attenuation through successive stages of 
symbolic refinement. 

The employment of conjunctions has greatly diminished 
from what it once was, as the reader may readily ascertain 
if he will only look into the prose of three centuries back. 
The writings of Hooker, for example, brisde with conjunc- 
tions, which we have now for the most part learned to dis- 
pense with. The conjunction being a comparatively late 
development, and being moreover a thing of literature to a 
greater extent than any other part of speech, was petted by 
writers and scholars into a fantastic luxuriance. It connected 
itself intimately with that technical logic which was the 
favourite study of the middle ages. Logic formed the base 
of the higher region of learning, and was the acquirement 
that popularly stamped a man as one of the learned, and 
hence it came that men prided themselves on their where- 
fores and iherefores^ and all the rest of that apparatus which 
lent to their discourse the prestige of a formulated piece 
of ratiocination. 

But this is now much abated, and the connection of 
sentences is to a large extent left to the intelligence of the 
reader. Two or three very undemonstrative conjunctions, 
such as if, hut, for, that, &c., will suffice for all the conjunc- 
tional appliances of page after page in a well-reasoned book. 
Often the word and is enough, where more than mere 



45^ THE LINK- WORD GROUP. 

concatenation is intended, and this colourless link-word 
seems invested with a meaning which recalls to mind what 
the and of the Hebrew is able to do in the subtle depart- 
ment of the conjunction. Indeed, we may say that we are 
coming back in regard to our conjunctions to a simplicity 
such as that from which the Hebrew language never de- 
parted. The Book of Proverbs abounds in examples of the 
versatility of the Hebrew a7td. Our but, as a conjunction, 
covers the ground of two German conjunctions, fonbertt and 
a6er. If we look at Proverbs x, there is a but in the middle 
of nearly every verse, equivalent to fonbern. These are all 
expressed in Hebrew by and. If we look at i. 25, 33 ; 
ii. 22 ; iv. 18, we see but'm the weightier sense of aBer, and 
here also the same simple and in the Hebrew. 

In the close of the following quotation, the and is equiva- 
lent to ' and yet ' or ' and at the same time.' 

' In Mecklenburg, Pommern, Pommerellen, are still to be seen physiogno- 
mies of a Wendish or Vandalic type (more of cheek than there ought to be, 
and less of brow ; otherwise good enough physiognomies of their kind) : 
but the general mass, tempered with such admixtures, is of the Platt-Deutsch, 
Saxon, or even Anglish character we are familiar with here at home. A 
patient stout people ; meaning considerable things, and very incapable of 
speaking what it means.' — Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, Bk, II. ch. iv. 

In conversation we omit the relative conjunction very 
usually, and poetry often does the same with great gain of 
ease and simplicity : 

• For I am he am born to tame you Kate.' 

Taming of the Shrew, ii. I. 

' Where is it mothers learn their love ? ' John Keble. 

But in proportion as conjunctions are less the vogue in 
recent times, they are employed with wider effect. See the 
expanse both ways over which, in the following quotation, v/e 
perceive the radiance of the conjunction 



CONJUNCTIONS, 459 

jyef. 

' The children attending these [parochial schools in Ireland] are, for the 
most part, clothed in rags, and fed upon the scanty and homely fare afforded 
in the cabin of an Irish peasant. In the charter schools, on the contrary, 
the children are comfortably lodged, well clad, and abundantly fed. No 
pains are spared to preserve their health. On the first appearance of disease, 
medical aid is procured ; and their teachers are in all cases equal, and 
generally far superior, to those employed in the daily and parochial schools. 
Yet I was invariably struck with the vast superiority in health, in appear- 
ance, in vivacity, and in intelligence, of the half-naked, and one almost 
would suppose half-starved, children who lived in their parents' cabins, over 
those so well-maintained and so carefully instructed in the charter schools. 
The reasons of this striking fact it might not be difficult to assign. In the 
charter schools all social and family affections are dried up ; children once 
received into them are, as it were, the children, the brothers, the sisters, 
the relations of — nobody ! They have no vacation — they know not the 
feeling of home ; and hence it is primarily, whatever concomitant causes 
there may be, that they are so frequently stunted in body, mind, and heart." 
— Quoted by Florence Hill in Contemporary Review, September, 1870. 

' You may paint with a very big brush, and yet not be a great painter.'—- 
Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, Bk. I. ch. i. 



CHAPTER X. 



OF SYNTAX. 

Syntax is a Greek word, signifying the order or array of 
words in a sentence. The study of this subject may be 
approached in two opposite ways. Either we may start 
with parts of speech as with a store of material, and out of 
these we may build up our syntax constructively. This is 
the method which is followed in grammatical exercises. 
The other way is to regard the sentence as the thing given, 
a growth or product of nature, and to proceed by the light of 
its sense, known to us as we know our mother tongue, to 
resolve it into its component parts, and so get at our syntax 
by a process of analysis. That this is the actual order of 
things we may see by a moment's reflection on the number 
of people who not only talk, but who daily read their news- 
paper, without the slightest notion of the parts of speech. 
This then is the natural, and consequently the philological, 
method. 

Syntax will accordingly mean the resolution of the sen- 
tence into its component parts, with a view of tracing by 
what contrivances it is made to produce a continuous and 
consistent signification. And we shall find that there are 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 46 1 

three kinds of instrumentality which are the most active in 
the production of this effect. 

The first of these is collocation, or the relative position of 
words. So far as this agency is exerted, the parts of a sen- 
tence tell their function by the mere order of their arrange- 
ment. This sort of syntax we call Flat. 

The second is where the functions of the members of the 
sentence are shewn by modifications in the forms of words. 
This is the Flexional Syntax. 

The third is where the same relations are expressed by 
symbolic words. This is the Phrasal Syntax. 

The analytical action of syntax resolves the sentence not 
merely into words, but into parts of speech. The knowledge 
of words as parts of speech is the sum total of the doctrine 
of syntax. And it happens quite naturally that many of the 
details which are ordinarily comprised under the head of 
syntax have already been disposed of in the foregoing chap- 
ters on the parts of speech. Accordingly, we have in the 
present chapter only to attend to the salient points, and those 
which are of the most essential value in the mechanism of 
the sentence ; and these are comprised in the above division, 
which will therefore constitute the plan of this chapter. 



I. Of Flat ok Collocative Syntax. 

How important an element mere position is in the structure 
of the English sentence, may readily be seen by the con- 
trast which appears if we consider how unimportant, or at 
least secondary the same element is in Latin. If we have to 
say that men seek victual, the words by which this would be 
expressed in Latin are so unaffected by the order of their 



462 OF SFNTAX. 

arrangement that it is impossible to dislocate the sentence. 
It is good in any order : — 

Homines quaerunt victum 
Qiiaerunt victum homines 
Victum homines quaerunt 
Homines victum quaerunt 
Victum quaerunt homines. 

All these variations are possible, because each word has its 
inflection, and that inflection determines the relative office of 
each word and its contribution towards the meaning of the 
whole. But in English the sense depends upon the arrange- 
ment, and therefore the order of the English sentence can- 
not be much altered without detriment to the sense : — 

Men seek victual. 

Cats like fish. 

Boys love play. 

Fools hate knowledge. 

Horses draw carts. 

Diamonds flash light. 

These examples present us with the simplest scheme of a 
sentence ; and in these examples we see that the sense 
requires the arrangement of the words in a certain order of 
collocation. 

Each of these three words is capable of amplification. In 
the first place the subject may be amplified by an adjective ; 
thus, — 

Hungry men seek victual. 
Wise men desire truth. 
Healthy boys love play. 

This adjective has its proper collocation. We have no 
choice whether we will say himgry men or men hungry. The 
latter is inadmissible, unless it were for some special exigency 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 463 

such as might rise in poetry ; and then the collocation would 
so far affect the impression communicated, that after all it 
could not be called a mere alternative, whether we would say 
hungry men or men hungry. 

The next thing is the placing of the article. The article 
stands immediately before the adjective : — 

The hungry man seeks victual. 

The healthy boy loves play. 

The wise man desires truth. 

This ampHfication brings out to view an important conse- 
quence of the order last observed. As w^e put our adjective 
before our substantive, it results that when the article is put 
before both, it is severed from the substantive to which it 
primarily appertains. 

The French, who can put the adjective either before or 
after its noun, have by this means the opportunity of keep- 
ing the article and noun together in most cases where it is 
desirable. This is a trifle, so long as it is confined to the 
difference between the wise man, a good man, and Thomme 
sage, un homme ban. But then the adjective being capable of 
amplification in its turn, the gap between the article and its 
noun may be considerably widened. An adverb may be put 
to the adjective, and then it becomes the truly wise man, a 
really good ma?i. Or, as in the following : — 

' The inadequacy of our means to meet the spiritual wants of the annually 
increasing population of this colony.' — Letter of the Bishop of Adelaide, 
1859- 

The severance between the article and its noun had not 
extended beyond such examples as these, until within the 
recent period which may be designated as the German era. 
Our increased acquaintance with German literature has 
caused an enlargement in this member of our syntax. We 
not unfrequently -find a second adverb, or an adverbial 



464 OF SYNTAX. 

phrase, or a negative, iaelnded in the interval between the 
article and its noiin ; thus, — y 

' In that not more populous than popular thoroughfare.* — Charles Dickens, 
Pickwick Papers, ch. xii. 

' A young man, with some tints of academical training, and some of the 
livid lights of a then only incipient Rationalism on his mind.' — Edwin Pax- 
ton Hood, Lectures to Students for the Ministry, 1867. 

' And is it indeed true that they are so plied with the gun and the net and 
the lime that the utter extinction of their species in these islands may be 
looked upon as a by no means remote eventuality ? ' 

In a translation from the German which I happen to be 
now reading, the following illustrations present themselves: — 

' A not altogether unsatisfactory picture.' 

' There he puts down the varied and important matter he is about td say, 
according to a large plan and tolerably strictly carried out arrangement.* 

This is now sometimes used by highly qualified English 
writers. In the following, from Mr. Weld's Vacation in 
Brittany, 1866, our stands in the place oi the: — 

' I have now travelled through nearly every Department in France, and I 
do not remember ever meeting with a dirty bed : this, I fear, cannot be said 
of our happily in all other respects cleaner island.' 

' Douglas, in the Nenia, p. 10, is so far as I know the first who called 
attention to this passage of our great poet [Hamlet v. l], as illustrating the 
very commonly to be observed presence of " shards, flints, and pebbles," in 
graves, into which it is diflScult to think they could have got by accident.' — 
George Rolleston, On Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon Sepidture. 

This expansibility of the noun applies equally to the sub- 
ject and to the object ; that is to say, it may take place either 
before or after the verb, or even both. It does not often 
happen that the two wings of the sentence are expanded in 
the same manner, because the effect would not be pleasing. 
But the same order rules on the one side as on the other ; 
and variety is sought only to avoid monotony. If we were 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 465 

speaking of the sense of liberty which is nourished in a 
people by the habit of discussing and correcting the laws 
which bind them, we might say, — 

Deliberation implies consent. 

Continuous deliberation implies continuous consent. 

A continuous deliberation implies a continuous consent. 

A continuous deliberation on the law implies a continuous consent to tlie 
law. 

A continuous deliberation on the law by the subject, implies a continuous 
assent to the law on the part of the subject. 

So well established is the general order of collocation, that 
marked divergences arrest the attention, and have, by reason 
of their exceptional character, a force which may be con- 
verted into a useful rhetorical eifect; thus, — 

beauties the most Oi 



' Having been successively subject to all these influences, our language has 
become as it were a sort of centre to which beauties the most opposite con- 
verge.' — H. T. W. Wood, The Reciprocal Influence of French and English 
Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 1870. 

And it occasionally happens that the surprise of an unusual 
order becomes the evidence to our minds that there is such a 
thing as a usual order of collocation. In the following sen- 
tence the putting of the comparative clause before the verb 
is an illustration of this : — 

• And this it is that I think I have seen, and that J wish, if I can be so 
happy, to shew to those who need it more than myself, and who better than 
myself may profit by it.' — The Mystery of Pain, 

When in the Idylls we read of the * Table Round,' we ex- 
perience a sort of pleasure from the strangeness of the collo- 
cation by which the adjective is put after its substantive : 
starting from the principle that the reverse is the true 
English order of collocation. This is one of the things 
Hh 



4^6 OF SYNTAX. 

which we have adopted for use in poetry .and in high style 
generally, and it is one of the traces which early French 
culture has left on our literature : — 

'A spring perennial rising in the heart.' 

Edward Young, Night Thoughts, viii. 958. 

*Futl many a gem of purest ray serene.' 

Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 

'Devastation universal.' — Henry Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm. 

Some parts of speech exhibit what' may be called, without 
too strong a figure, a jealousy of their position in the sen- 
tence. The adjective offers a ready illustration of this. 
The place between the article and the substantive is first 
and foremost the property of the adjective. An adverb may 
be there as attendant on an adjective, but not alone. To 
exemplify this we need a word that has changed from an 
adjectival to an adverbial habit. Such a word we have in 
only. As an adjective, the place of this word is between 
the article and the substantive — ' The only path.' In our 
early literature this word is usually an adjective, but at 
present it is usually an adverb. And this is why the reader 
is often checked by meeting this word in what seems an 
unintelligible position. Spenser has {The Faerie Queene, iii. 
2.38) 

* But th' only shade and semblant of a knight ' 

where we should now say 'only the shade,' &c. If we 
preserve the order we must change the word, and say, * the 
mere shade.* When only had come to be an adverb, it was 
felt that its collocation required altering, so as to be outside 
the pale of the article and substantive. 

And as the adjective only, having acquired the habit of 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 467 

an adverb, had to shift from the place of the adjective to 
that assigned to the adverb; in hke manner may we find 
cases where the same adjective might well shift its position 
from the adverb's place, for fear of the inconvenience of 
being accounted an adverb. 

In Psalm Ixxxiii. 18 (elder version), it is said, 'Thou art 
only the most Highest over all the earth/ So Richard 
Sibbes {Puritan Divines, vol. i. p. 92) has 'which will only 
give us boldness,' meaning to say that which we should now 
express by this ' which only {or alone) will give us boldness.' 
To understand this only as an adverb would be to stultify 
the sense. How absurd would it sound to say that the 
Queen is only the supreme authority in the British Empire ! 
While only had no character but its original one of an 
adjective, the above order might stand without risk of con- 
fusion ; but after the adverbial habit had developed itself, it 
became necessary, not only for the adverb to keep out of 
any place where it might be accounted an adjective, but also 
equally necessary for the adjective to keep out of any 
position in which it might look like an adverb. And there- 
fore it must be thus collocated : ' Thou only art,' &c. Thus 
we see in the case of this word two contrary illustrations of 
its sensitiveness in matter of collocation. In the former 
case it has to move from the adjectival place because it can 
no longer sustain the adjectival character, having come to 
be reputed as an adverb ; in the latter case it has to protect 
its adjectival character against adverbial appearances by 
moving from that position in front of an article which is the 
lot of the adverb. 

Before the development of flexion and symbolism, 
there was a dearth of means for expressing those modifica- 
tions which are now efi'ected by adverbs and adverbial 
phrases. In the collocational stage of syntax, the chief 
H h 2 



468 OF SYNTAX. 

means resorted to for this end was repetition. Early lan- 
guages bear about them traces of this contrivance. The 
Hebrew is remarkable for this. The following little speci- 
men may serve as an indication. In Mark vi. 39, 40, there 
occurs a Hebraism in the Greek text which is not rendered, 
and indeed hardly could be rendered, in English. The 
Hebrew (we will call it) says ' companies companies,' and 
' ranks ranks.' The English says * by companies ' and * in 
ranks/ Here we have a certain idea expressed in the one 
by a syntax of collocation — for repetition is a form of collo- 
cation, and in the other by a syntax of symbolism — namely, 
by th« intervention of prepositions. Here then we have 
the most ancient form of expressing this idea, contrasted 
with the most modern. Between these t^vo lies the flexional 
way of saying the same thing. The true Greek idiom or 
the Latin gives it to us flexionally in the forms €ik-qh6v and 
catervaHm, which we cannot match by any extant expression 
in English. 

It seldom happens that means which have once been 
largely used, even though they should be superseded by 
other contrivances, are -entirely abolished. We still have 
recourse to mere repetition for heightening an effect ; as — 

' A lesson too too hard for living clay.' 

The Faerie Queeite, iii. 4. 26. 

*Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt!' 

Hamlet, i. 2. 

B\it we proceed to notice a feature of flat syntax which is 
peculiarly English. This is the transformation of a sub- 
stantive into an adjective by position alone. I doubt whether 
there is anything that is so characteristic of our language as 
this particular faculty. 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 469 

cottage dames. 

'What sages would have died to learn, 
Now taught by cottage dames.' 

Christian Year, ' Catechism.' 

In the region of pre-historic archaeology alone we hear 
of the stone period, a copper period, the bronze period, and 
the iron period. In all these expressions the epithets are 
substantives converted into adjectives by position alone. 
There are three examples of this in the following short 
quotation from Sir John Lubbock : — 

' Stone weapons of many kinds were still in use during the age of bronze, 
and even during that of iron, so that the mere presence of a few stone im- 
plements is not in itself sufficient evidence that any given " find " belongs 
to the stone age.' — Pie-Historic Times, 2nd ed. 1869, p. 3. 

vme discasey cattle disease, potato disease. 

' In Hungary there has been no vine disease, no cattle disease, and no 
potato disease.' 

In Hebrews x. Contents, we find an instance which 
amounts to a solecism : ' the law sacrifices.' 

This constructive juxtaposition of two nouns stands in 
an intimate relation with that great body of English com- 
pounds which will be treated of in the first section of the 
next chapter. But nearly related as these two features are, 
they must be carefully distinguished from one another, as 
their very tendency to blend makes it the more necessary to 
keep them well apart. Just as the lowest stage of organised 
existence is that in which we are met by the difficulty of dis- 
tinguishing between animal and vegetable life, so here, in 
the most elementary region of syntax, we are hardly able to 
keep the organism of the sentence distinct from that of the 
word. In many instances there is fair room for doubt 
whether two words are in the compound or the construct 



47 O OF SYNTAX. 

State. Perhaps some of the following m^y be so regarded : 
— race horse, horse race ; field path, path field ; herb garden, 
garden herb. These may be written either with or without 
the hyphen, that is to say, either as compound words or as 
words in construction. In such cases it is not to be sup- 
posed that principle is wanting, but that through the fine- 
ness of the difference our discernment is at fault in the 
application of the principle. 

The following from a first-class print is a clear instance 
of a misplaced hyphen ; it ought to be written thus : — 

ffiarriage settlements. 

' The Married Women's Property Act, 1870, was intended to prevent the 
personal property of a woman, her wages and earnings, being at the absolute 
mercy and control of her husband's creditors. It was supposed that it would 
be an especial protection to that poorer class of women whose property 
before marriage was too small to be worth the expense and life-long trouble 
of marriage-settlements.' 

There are in English two great formulas for the con- 
struction of substantival phrases, and there is perhaps no 
more convenient, as there certainly cannot be a more 
national medium of exhibiting these, than through the long 
and short titles of our Acts of Parliament. 

According to one of these formulas, the words and 
phrases which constitute a substantival whole, are con- 
catenated by means of prepositions thus: — 

' An Act further to amend the Laws relating to the Representation of 
the People in England and Wales.* 

' An Act for the Abolition of Compulsory Church Rates.' 

'An Act to make further Amendments in the Laws for the Relief of the 
Poor in England and Wales.' 

The Other formula merely collocates some of the more 
substantival words in juxtaposition, and that in a reversed 
order: as — 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 47 1. 

' The Representation of the People Act.' 
' The Compulsory Church Rate Abolition Act.' 
' The Poor Law Amendment Act.' 
•The Sea Birds Preservation Bill.' 

Our speech has acquired this faculty and range of varia- 
tion by its historical combination of the two great linguistic 
elements of Western civilization, the Roman and the Gothic. 
The long style of structure is that which we have learned 
from the French : the shart and reversed style is our own 
native Saxon. 

We will close this section with the flat infinitive, or in- 
finitive expressed by position alone. The most peculiarly 
English use is that of the infinitive after the verb do, as / do 
think, I did expect In order to understand the original 
action of the auxiliary do, we must remember that it has 
been symboHsed into its present function from a state in 
which it meant make to with an infinitive of the act 

In the Ordinance of the Guild of St. Katherine at Stam- 
ford (1494) we may see an instance of do followed by a flat 
infinitive, and in the course of the same sentence a second 
instance where do has the phrasal infinitive after it, and the 
power of do is the same in the one case as in the other : — 

' Also it is ordeyned, that when any Broder or Suster of this gilde is 
decessed oute off this worlde, then, wdthyn the xxx. dayes of that Broder or 
Suster, in the Chirch of Seynt Poules, ye Steward of this Gilde shall doo 
Ringe for hym, and do to say a placebo and dirige, w* a masse on ye 
morowe of Requiem, as ye comoun use is.' 

But the construction is precisely similar in such cases as 
the following : — 

I will hope. 
I shall go. 
You cannot think. 
You may try. 



472 OF SYNTAX. 

You might get. 
They would have. 
They should not have. 
They shall smart. 

In all these the final word is an infinitive by position. 
In Saxon it would have been expressed by a flectional 
infinitive. 

' iErest mon sceal God lufian. Ne First we must love God. We 

sceal mon mann slean. ne stelan. must not man-slay, nor steal, nor 

ne leasimga secgan. ac aelcne mann tell lies : but we must always respect 

mon sceal a weorJ)ian. and ne sceal every man ; and no man ought to do 

nan mann don o'Srum J)aet he nelle to others what he would not they 

J)aet him mon do.' — Suuithun, p. 112. should do to him. 

Our present flat infinitive cannot therefore be derived 
from Saxon, but must be regarded as an example in lan- 
guage of a tendency to reversion from the more advanced 
and developed to the more primitive and archetypal forms 
of speech. 

The positional stage of syntax is most highly displayed 
in the Chinese language. This is in itself S, confirmation 
of the claim which Chinese literature makes to an exceed- 
ingly high antiquity. Speaking generally, it may be said 
that the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position. 
Chinese words change their grammatical character as sub- 
stantives, adjectives, verbs, according to their relative posi- 
tions in the collocation of the sentence. M. Julien has 
published a Chinese syntax with a title in which this prin- 
ciple is conspicuously displayed^. From a notice of this 

^ Syntaxe Nouvelle de la Langue Chinoise, fondee sur la Position des 
Mots, suivie de deux Traites sur les Particules, et les principaux Termes de 
Grammaire, d'une Table des Idiotismes, de Fables, de Legendes et d'Apo- 
logues traduits mot a mot. Par M. Stanislas Julien, Paris : Librairie de 
Maisonneuve. London: Triibner and Co. 1869. 



FLAT OR COLLOCATIVE SYNTAX. 473 

work in the Academy the following illustrations are bor- 
rowed : — 

' For instance, the character tch'i, " to govern,"" if placed before a sub- 
stantive remains a verb, as tch'i koUe," to govern a kingdom;" if the order 
of these two characters is reversed, they signify, " the kingdom is governed ;" 
and if the character tch'i be placed after chi, " a magistrate," it becomes a 
substantive, and the two words are then to be translated, " the administration 
of the magistrates." ' 

Very remarkable is the plasticity of signification which 
such a grammatical system demands. 

' For instance, we find the expression i tsouan tsonan tchi. The primary 
meaning of the character tsouan is " an awl," or anything with which a hole 
is bored ; and in this sentence we recognise that, since the first tsouan is 
preceded by i, the sign of the instrumental case, it stands in the place of a 
substantive ; i tsouan, therefore, means " with an awl ;" but the character 
tchi being plainly the object of a verb, the second tsouan must, by virtue of 
its position, be considered as a verb, and the sentence will then read thus.^ 
" with an awl to bore it " {tchi).' 

It must not be supposed that the Chinese language stands 
alone in the possession of such a syntax : what it does stand 
alone in, is in the development of a great literature through 
means so rudimentary. The whole outer field of so-called 
Allophylian languages, those namely which lie outside the 
Aryan and Semitic families, appear to be of this character. 
Mr. Farrar in his Families of Speech, p. 160, divides these 
into — (i) Isolating, i.e. monosyllabic and unsyntactical ; (2) 
Agglutinating ; (3) Poly synthetic : and all these are but 
different stages and conditions of the positional. This is 
therefore to be regarded as the basement storey of all syntax^ 
and it is largely discoverable in the English language. 



474 OF SYNTAX, 



, II. Syntax of Flexion. 

Flexion is any modiiication of a word whereby its relation 
to the sentence is indicated. The syntax of the English 
language is weakest in this division. We can only collect 
a few remaining features, which have lived through the 
collision of the transition period, and have up to the present 
time defied the innovations of the symbolic movement. 

We have retained the genitive singular of nouns, as 
' Simon's wife's mother.' — Luke iv, 38. With regard to the 
possessive s there is a sort of canon stated by S. T. Cole- 
ridge in a letter to H. C. Robinson, which though perhaps 
a litde oif-hand, is worth consideration : — 

' I have read two pages of Lalla Roolih, or wiiatever it is called. Merci- 
ful Heaven ! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to 
any questions, " I have but just looked at the work." Oh, Robinson ! if I 
could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could 
I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines 
together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recur- 
ing blunder of using the possessive case, " compassion's tears," &c. for the . 
preposition "of" — a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than 
Dryden's slovenly verses written for the trade. The rule is, that the case 's 
is always penonal ; either it marks a person, or a personification, or the 
relique of some proverbial personification, as *' Who for their belly's sake," 
in Lycidas.'— Diary, 1817. 

This doctrine cannot now be rigidly insisted upon. The 
following is from the editorial part of a leading English 
journal ,• — 

• President Woolsey \North American Review, October, 1870] incidentally 
raises one point which is at the present time being warmly discussed with 
us — the question whether international injuries are independent of municipal 
law or arise out of it and are to be measured by it. The American jurist 
holds to the former opinion. The rights of other nations do not end with 
the provisions of any country's municipal law.' 

The last clause would in French have to be expressed 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 475 

after in this manner : — ' the provisions of the municipal law 
of any country.' 

' Religious great men have loved to say that their sufficiency was of God. 
But through every great spirit runs a train of feeling of this sort ; and the 
power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Calvinism, comes from 
Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it.' — Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and 
Protestantism, p. 120. 

Other inflections of the noun we have lost, but there 
sometimes remains in construction a reminiscence of some 
obsolete case-flexion. Thus in i Kings vii. 40, 'The work 
that he made king Solomon/ the two final words are in 
a dative position though not in dative forms. The same 
may be said of the words ' their bodies ' in the following 
quotation : — 

' They surely trust to win their bodies a resurrection to immortality.' — 
Homily on the Sacrament, Part I. 

Of pronominal inflection there is but little remaining 
which really serves any purpose of syntax. In such cases 
as o/me, to him, from them, it is true that me, him, them, are 
inflections; but then the relation which they once served to 
express is now expressed by th^ preposition. Mine may be 
regarded as a flexion by an archaeological efl"ort of mind, 
for it is an old genitive of me. But in its ordinary use there 
is no call to think of this, for it appears as an adjectival pro- 
noun. But when there is a phrase in which it shews a trace 
of its old genitival extraction, then it is accompanied with a 
preposition ; as, ' That boy of mine.' 

We have, however, dative pronouns without the preposi- 
tion, as in give me, teil him, and in our elder literature more 
frequently : — 

me. 

' That my hand may be restored mee againe.' — i Kings xiii. 6. 



47 6 OF SYNTAX. 

In the following quotation him in the second part is equiva- 
lent to the unto him that went before : — 

' Lend not vnto him that is mightier then thy selfe ; for if thou lendest 
him, count it but lost.' — Ecclesiasticm viii. 12. 

In the next quotation, we should now say to him : — 

' And sent him them to Jezreel.' — 2 Kings x. 7. 

Not even a poet in our day could write her for to her in such 
a structure as this : — 

' His lovely words her seemd due recompence.' 

The Faerie Queene, i. 3. 30. 

Methinks is now written as one word. It consists of me in 
the dative case, and thinks, an old impersonal equivalent to 
the Latin videtur, radically connected no doubt with our verb 
' I think,' ' he thinks,' &c., but quite distinct from it. The 
distinction is kept up in German between benft the verb 
of thought, and biiinft of seeming, which is that now 
before us. 

But the verb is the great stronghold of flexion. More 
than any other part of speech it attracts and attaches inflec- 
tions to itself in times when flexion is growing : and on the 
other hand, when flexion is on the wane, the verb is the 
most retentive of its relics, and the most reluctant to part 
with them. There is no language of Western Europe in 
which the verb has parted with its flexion more than in 
English. The Gothic languages are the most advanced in 
this respect, and especially the Danish, Swedish, and 
English. 

The verbal inflections which are still used to express 
person, tense, or mood, are as follows : — 

(See) seest, sees, seeth, saw, sawest, seen, seeing. 
(Look) lookest, looks, looketh, looked, lookedst, looking. 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 477 

Half of these are antiquated, and all that are in habitual use 
are, — 

sees, saw, seen, seeing, 
looks, looked, looking. 

A feature worthy of contemplation is that whereby the 
flexion which expresses past time is employed also for con- 
tingency or uncertainty. It appears as if the link of sym- 
pathy between the two things thus rendered by a selfsame 
formula were remoteness from the speaker's possession. 

Looking at the ^oxdi attempted hy\i?>e\i ^e should associate 
it with the idea of past time, but in the following sentence it 
expresses contingency and not time, or if it regards time at 
all, the time is future. 

' His power would break and shiver like glass, if he attempted it.' 

had (subjunctive). 

*I say not that she ne had kunnyng 
What harme was, or els she 
Had coulde no good, so thinketh me. 
And trewly, for to speke of trouth. 
But she had had, it had be routh.' 

Chaucer, The Booke of the Dutchesse, 996. 

' If this man had not twelve thousand a-year, he would be a very stupid 
fellow.' — Jane Austen, Mwisfield Par}, ch. iv. 

• And some among yau held, that -if the King 
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow; 
Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
To whom a space of land is given to plough. 
Who may not wander from the allotted field. 
Before his work be done.' Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail. 

In the single case of the verb to be, however, there are 
distinct forms or flexions for the subjunctive. Be was 
originally indicative, as it still is in Devonshire, and in . our 
Bible: 'They be blind leaders of the blind.'— Matt. xv. 14. 



47 8 OF SYNTAX. 

But inasmuch as the present had another form ts, are, a 
division of labour took place, whereby be was reserved for 
the subjunctive and conditional present. In the revision 
of the Common Prayer Book in 1661, are was substituted 
for be in forty-three places, and the indicative be was left 
standing in one place only, namely this — ' Which be they ? ' ^ 
The subjunctive thus recently acquired is now antiquated; 
and not even in a sermon of the present day should we 
meet with the like of this of Isaac Barrow's : — ■ 

' Be we never so urgently set, or closely intent upon any work (be we 
feeding, be we travelling, be we trading, be we studying), nothing yet can 
forbid, but that we may together wedge in a thought concerning God's good- 
ness, and bolt forth a word of Praise for it.' — The Duty of Prayer. 

On the same principle was and were took distinct offices: — 



' I am not able to unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licencing can be 
exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he who 
were pleasantly dispos'd, could not well avoid to lik'n it to the exploit of 
that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park- 
gate.' — ^John Milton, Areopagitica. 

' If every action which is good or evill in man at ripe years, were to be 
under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a 
name, what praise could be then due to well-doing, what grammercy to be 
sober, just, or continent ? ' — Id. 

This were is not so freely employed now as it once was, 
and if it goes out, it will be a beauty lost. But however it 
may be with colloquy and familiar prose, it can hardly be 
spared from poetry and the style of dignity : — 

' But to live by law, 
Acting the law we live by without fear; 
And, because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.' 

Alfred Tennyson, CEnone. 

'^ From the beautiful photozincographic facsimile done at the Ordnance 
Survey Office in Southampton, 1870. 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 479 

But should these subjunctives be and were fall into complete 
desuetude, they will leave behind some fossil traces of their 
existence in the conjunction howbeit, and in the phrasal 
adverb as it were. 

Under the head of Flexional Syntax we must notice that 
participial and generalising prefix ge-, which once was so 
rife in our language, and which still flourishes with such a 
fine effect in German. With us it has dwindled into a 
poetical curiosity, and it has taken the form oi y- or other 
forms still less recognisable. 

ychain'd. 

'Yet first to those ychain'd in sleep, 
The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep.' 

John Milton, On the Morning of Christ*s Nativity, xvi. 

yclept. 

' But come thou Goddess fair and free, 
In Heaven ycleap'd Euphrosyne.' Id. VAllegro. 

ypointing. 

'What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones, 
The labour of an age in piled Stones, 
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid, 
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?' Id. On Shahspear, 1630. 

Our examples of English flexion are mostly of the 
decrepit kind, in the last stage of decay. They are rather 
relics of a flexion that has been active in a former stage of 
the language, than of what properly belongs to modern 
English. But there is at least one instance of a flexion that 
has taken form within the English period. Such is the 
adverbial flexion beginning with the French preposition a, 
which has in most instances become symphytic. It has lost 
the memory of its origin and has become a mere flexion. 
Thus, amain or aright is as much an adverbial flexion of the 



480 OF SYNTAX. 

substantive main or the adjective ngkf, as is the adverb 
mainly or rightly. 

amain, 
' And with his troupes doth march amaine to London,' 

3 Henry VI, iv. 8. 4. 

In early times the a was often written as a separate pre- 
position, to the confusion of modern annotators : — 

' There-fore he was a prikasoure a right.' 

Chaucer, Prologue, 189 ; Lansdowne MS, 

a laughter. 

' And therewithal a laughter out he brast.' 

The Court of Love^ ad finem. 

a forlorn. 
' And forc'd to Hue in Scotland a Forlorne.' 

Shakspeare, 3 Henry VI, iii. 3. 26. 

In this passage we are furnished with tlie correction * all 
forlorn/ 

We will close this section as we closed the previous one, 
with the infinitive. The old grammatical infinitive in -en 
lingered in our language as late as the Elizabethan period. 
Thus Surrey : — 

sayen. 

* Give place, :ye lovers, here before 
That spent your boasts and brags in ^-aiu; 
My lady's beauty passeth more 
The best of yours, I dare well sayen, 
Than doth the sun the candle light. 
Or brightest day the darkest night.' 

But while we lost the form in -en, we unconsciously re- 
tained the same thing in a slightly disguised form, namely 
with the ending in -ing. The function of this infinitive was 
chiefly (but not entirely) restricted to what in Latin grammar 
would be called gerundial uses. The tendency to turn -an 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 48 1 

or -en into -mg shews itself elsewhere : thus, Ahhandun has 
become Abingdon ; and we are all pretty familiar with such 
forms as garding, capting, lunching. When the mind has 
lost its hold on the meaning of a given form, the organs 
of speech are apt to slide into any contiguous form that has 
more present currency or is more vital with present meaning. 
The -an or -en of the infinitive became -ing because it was 
surrounded with nouns and participles in -ing which differed 
from the infinitive by a difference too fine to be held-to in 
the transition and Early English periods, with their neglect 
of the vernacular. Hence it has become traditional to 
explain this form always either as a substantive or as a 
present participle. But there is a large class of instances 
to which these explanations will not apply. In such a sen- 
tence as the following, ' Europeans are no match for 
Orientals in evading a question,' evading is clearly a verb 
governing its substantive ; and yet it is not a participle, for 
it has nothing adjectival about it. By an infinitive I under- 
stand a verb in a substantival aspect ; by a participle, a verb 
in an adjectival aspect. In the saying of Rowland Hill to 
his co-pastor Theophilus Jones, ' Never mind breaking 
grammar if/ &c., the word breaking is clearly a verb, and 
can be no otherwise grammatically designated than as an 
infinitive. The nature of the participle is seen in the 
following : — 

' All is hazard that we have, 
Here is nothing bideing ; 
Dayes of pleasure are like streams 
Through faire Medows gliding.' 

Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 350. 

The analysis of a sentence is, however, a subjective act, 
as we have already observed ; and if any insist on mentally 
supplying the formula requisite to establish the participial 



482 OF SYNTAX. 

character ot every verb in -mg, I know of no argument 
potent enough to restrain them. But there is a large number 
of instances in which I think that whether the case be his- 
torically or grammatically tested, it must be pronounced an 
infinitive. As this is a point of some importance, I have 
collected rather a copious Ust of examples of the infinitive 
in -ing. 

Historically there is no case clearer than that in which it 
follows verbs of going ; as — 

' Oh how shall the dumb go a courting ? ' Bloomfield. 

Perhaps the plainest instances (to the modern grammatical 
sense) are those in which the word has a verbal government, 
and yet canno^; be accounted a participle, as : — 

fitiding. 

' And I can see that Mrs. Grant is anxious for her not finding Mansfield 
dull as winter comes on.' — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, vol. ii. ch. iii. 

simplifying, 

' I feel it a surprise, every time I see Parry : there seems to be a power 
of simplifying whatever comes near him, an atmosphere in which trifles 
die a natural death.' — Memoirs 0/ Sir W. E. Parry. 

believing in. 

' Babes are not expected to prove their relationship before believing in 
their mothfers.' — Laurence Oliphant, Piccadilly (1870), p. 275. 

organizing, gathering, obtaining, distributing, detecting. 
• Organizing charitable relief over areas conterminous with those of the 
Poor Law, and gathering together all the representative forces we can for 
common action, seems to us the best method of obtaining the two impor- 
tant aims of distributing judicious charity and detecting imposition.' — 
Alsager Hay Hill, Tiines, October 22, 1869. 

marrying, abandoning. 

- Their choice lies, then, only between marrying money, or abandoning 
all their connexions, habits, and amusements.' — John Boyd - Kinnear, 
Woman's Work, 353. 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 4S3 

creating. 

' It does not seem safe in regard to this to rely on the ordinary rule of 
demand creating supply.' — Sir J. T. Coleridge, Keble, p. 381. 

predicting, conspiring. 

' Some people will never distinguish between predicting an eclipse and 
conspiring to bring it about.' 

A very good illustration of our point may be got from 
sentences of the following type, in which the infinitive- 
regnant with to stands counterposed with our flexional 
infinitive : — 

' Where the case is so plain, it is not for the dignity of this house to 
inquire instead of acting.'— TzTOgs, February 11, 1870, Summary. 

Sometimes the infinitive with to has been pushed beyond 
the sphere now alloted to it, and a rendering by the infinitive 
in -ing would seem more natural. Spenser has 

' For not to have been dipt in Lethe lake 
Could save the son of Thetis from to die ; 

which in modern English would be expressed thus : — ' His 
having-been-dipped in Lethe could not save Achilles from 
dying.' 

The following is somewhat similar : — 

' It comes either from weakness or guiltiness, to fear shadows.' — Richard 
Sibbes, Soul's Conjiict, ch. x. 

The following passages contain some mixed examples : — 

' I am convinced a man might sit down as systematically and as suc- 
cessfully to the study of wit, as he might to the study of the mathematics ; 
and I would answer for it, that, by giving up only six hours a day to being 
witty, he should come on prodigiously before midsummer, so that his 
friends should hardly know him again. For what is there to hinder the 
mind from gradually acquiring a habit of attending to the lighter relations 
of ideas in which wit consists ? Punning grows upon everybody, and pun- 
ning is the wit of words. — Sydney Smith, Wit and Humotir. 

I i 2 



4^4 



OF SYNTAX. 



* But it is clear that, as society goes on accumulating powers and gifts, 
the one hope of society is in men's modest and unselfish use of them ; in 
simplicity and nobleness of spirit increasing, as things impossible to our 
fathers become easy and familiar to us; in men caring for better things 
than money and ease and honour ; in being able to see the riches of the 
world increase and not set our hearts upon them ; in being able to admire 
and forego.' — R. W. Church, Sermons, ii. 1 868. 

Defend me, therefore, common sense, say I, 
From reveries so airy, from the toil 
Of dropping buckets into empty wells, 
And growing old in drawing nothing up.' 

William Cowper, The Garden. 

' True religion prescribes a kind of grace, not only before meals, but 
before setting out for a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a pleasant 
meeting ; a grace before reading any author that delights us,' — Charles 
Lamb, Essays of Elia, 'Grace before Meat.' 

' She had then no alternative but to take the path of the thicket, nor did 
she pursue it long before coming in sight of a singular spectacle.' — Sir Walter 
Scott, Castle Dangerous, ch, iv. 

A case that deserves a place apart is that of being and 
having when they enter into the composition of infinitives, 
active or passive : — 

' The present apparent hopelessness of a really CEcumenical Council being 
assembled.' — John Keble, Life, p. 425. 

In the next piece it would be allowable to substitute ' to 
have heard ' for ' having heard ' : — 

' I recollect having heard the noble lord the member for Tiverton deliver 
in this House one of the best speeches I ever listened to. On that occasion 
the noble lord gloried in the proud name of England, and, pointing to the 
security with which an Englishman might travel abroad, he triumphed in 
the idea that his countrymen might exclaim, in the spirit of the ancient 
Roman, Civis Romanus sum.' — John Bright, Speeches, 1853, ed. J. E. T. 
Rogers. 

In our next quotation it appears in a passive form : — 

' Great men like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute their success 
to their fortune, their star ; religious great men have loved to say that their 
sufficiency was of God. But through every great spirit runs a train of feeling 
of this sort ; and the power and depth which there undoubtedly is in Cal- 
vinism, comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it.' — Matthew 
Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 1 20. 



SYNTAX OF FLEXION. 485 

The expression in the following line is certainly con- 
densed, and the grammar by no means explicit, but I should 
be curious to know by what process of thought the word 
ivriting could be accepted in any other character than that 
of an infinitive : — 

' Nature's chief master-piece is writing well.' 

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, 725. 

The expression ' about doing anything ' is considered bad 
grammar, yet it is met with in authors of repute : — 

' He was about retracing his steps, when he was suddenly transfixed to 
the spot by a sudden appearance.' — Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 
ch. xxiii. 

The aversion which there is to this particular expression 
might perhaps be modified if the verb in -ing were acknow- 
ledged to be an infinitive. I do not mean to say that this 
consideration ought to be decisive. Language is not alto- 
gether governed by logic. Any form of speech is doomed, 
if it minister occasion to confusion of thought. 

The really dubious cases are those where this infinitive 
is so like a noun-substantive as to be hardly distinguished 
from it. In fact these two blend so closely as to defy all 
attempts at a Hne of demarcation. One could not even 
convince a determined adversary on the ground of their 
governing a case, if he were quick enough to remember that 
in Plautus the Latin substantive in -lo governs an accusative 
case just like a verb ! I will therefore only say, that in such 
instances as the following I think the meaning is better 
apprehended by regarding them as verb-substantives, that 
is to say, infinitives. 

versing. 

' I once more smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing.' George Herbert. 



486 OF SYNTAX. 

flying. 

' Johnny watched the swallows trying 
Which was cleverest at flying.' 

prelating, labouring, lording. 

' Amende therfore, and ye that be prelates loke well to your office, for 
right prelatynge is busye labourynge and not lordyng.' — Hugh Latimer, 
The Ploughers, 1 549. 

While we are on this flexional infinitive, I must call atten- 
tion to one of the finest of our provincialisms. It is when 
this infinitive is used as sonething between active and 
passive, as if it were a neutral voice, like the so-called 
middle voice in Greek. In all classes of society in York- 
shire it may be heard ; as, ' Do you want the tea making/ 
' I want my coat brushing,' &c. 

In the prospectus of a projected almanack which was 
circulated in November, 1869, and which was dated from 
Darwen, Lancashire, it is said that 

' The miscellaneous matter on the other pages of the almanack treats of 
topics which the clergy are likely to want prominently placing before their 
parishioners.' 

Not very unlike this is the expression in the Offertory 
Rubric — 'While these sentences are in reading.' In modern 
English we should make it passive, and say — ' While these 
sentences are being read.' 

We may well contend for the infinitival character of this 
-ing, if only to rescue from the wreck of our old flexional 
system some time-honoured relic. The English language 
has divested itself of flexion to a most remarkable degree. 
But we must not suppose that when a language puts off the 
garb of flexion it becomes with her as if she had never put 
it on. No; we must allow for something like what the 
naturalists calls 'heredity', whereby a result once obtained 
is continued traditionally. 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 487 

If it was difificult to accomplish the task of the first section 
of this chapter, and delineate in a complete manner a 
syntax of collocation, this is due to the influence of flexion. 
Flexion itself may pass away, but its consequences remain. 
The maxim of the jurist, ' Cessante causa cessat effectus/ 
does not govern language. 

In a deflexionised language like ours, though almost all 
the flexions have themselves disappeared, they have not 
carried away with them those modifications of arrangement 
and collocation of which they first furnished the occasion. 



III. Of Syntax by Symbolic Words. 

As the natural division of flexion is into the two kinds, 
the flexion that attaches to the noun and that which attaches 
to the verb, and as symboUsm is an equivalent of flexion, 
the most convenient plan for this section will be the division, 
into the symboHsm of the verb and the symbolism of the 
noun. 

And this division will not only be found to rest upon a 
sound philological basis, but it will also prove convenient 
from a historical point of view. For that explicitness of 
syntax which we have acquired by the development of sym- 
bolism, is drawn partly from the Gothic and partly from the 
Roman source. It may be said, speaking in general terms, 
that the explicit verb has come to us from the Saxon, and 
the explicit noun from the French, 

The most signal example of a symbolic word, which exists 
entirely to serve the purposes of syntax, is the symbol-verb 
* to be.' From the moment that this verb had acquired its 
symbolic value, we may say that the reign of flexion was 



488 OF SYNTAX. 

doomed. Not that it is the universal solvent of flexion, but 
it has been the chief means of undermining it in its own 
favourite stronghold, the verb. We are told by Sanskrit 
scholars that this symbol is found in the oldest Sanskrit 
monuments, and that none of the Aryan languages are with- 
out it. But if we compare its functions now in the great 
languages of Europe with those which it had in Greek and 
Latin, we shall find that the agency of this verb to be has 
greatly enlarged its sphere. Take for example the passive 
verb, which had a complete flexional apparatus in Greek as 
(f)iXov[iai with its parts, and in Latin as a?7ior with its parts — 
all these flexions have disappeared, and in place of each one 
of them has stepped in a function of this symbolic verb. 

Amor, I am loved. 

Amabar, I was loved. 

Amabor, I shall be loved. 

Amarer, I should be loved, &c. 

This substitution of symbol-verbs for inflections is found 
equally in French and German : — Je suis aimd ; 3^ Bin 
gelie6t. But in English we have our own peculiar little 
openings for enlarging this ever-growing power of be. Such 
idiomatic terms as ' I am to go,' ' She is to do it,' ' Such a 
thing is to be,' ' I 'm to be queen of the May,' are thoroughly 
English. On the other hand, ' Where have you been ? I 
have been to seek for you,' is French — ' Ou avez vous ^t^ ? 
J'ai ^t^ vous chercher.' 

The great power of this symbol-verb for revolutionizing 
flexional languages has lain a long time dormant. Espe- 
cially has this been the case in sacred languages. The 
Hebrew is an eminently flexional language, especially in 
regard to its system of verbs. The symbol-verb is there 
found in full development, but in very limited action. The 
following little piece of statistics wifl give some idea of this. 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 489 

In the English version of the little Book of Jonah, I count 
forty-two occurrences of the verb ' to be,' but when I refer 
to the original, I find that only six of these are represented 
by the verb ' to be ' in Hebrew. And as one of the cases 
is not symbolic but substantive, we have the still wider ratio 
of five to forty-one. 

I one day expressed to an intimate friend my regret that 
the collectors of vocabularies among savage tribes did not 
tell us something about the verb ' to be,' and especially I 
instanced the admirable word- collections of Mr. Wallace. 
To this conversation I owe the pleasure of being able to 
quote Mr. Wallace's own observations on this subject in his 
reply to my friend's query. He says : — 

' As to such words as " to be," it is impossible to get them in any savage 
language till you know how to converse in it, or have some intelligent inter- 
preter who can do so. In most of the languages such extremely general 
words do not exist, and the attempt to get them through an ordinary inter- 
preter would inevitably lead to error. . . . Even in such a comparatively 
high language as the Malay, it is difficult to express " to be " in any of our 
senses, as the words used would express a number of other things as well, 
and only serve for " to be " by a roundabout process.' 

Keeping a sort of company with the verb to be, there is 
found in all the great languages a verb which signifies to 
come to be, to get to be. This is in Greek ylveadai, in Latin 
Jien, in French devenir, and in German txierben — symbol- 
verbs of great mark each in its own language. In our 
native tongue the old word was weor^an, the analogue of the 
German tcerben, but we gradually lost it ; and now we retain 
only a fossil relic of it in the imperative or subjunctive worthy 
as in the expression, ' Woe worth the day.' Instead of this 
weor^an we have qualified a new word for its place, a com- 
pound of the verb comCy namely become. In early times the 
sense of coming was dominant in this word. In the Saxon 
Gospels, Luke ii. 38, ' theos thaere tide becumende ' answers 
to our ' she coming-in that instant.' 



49^ OP SYNTAX. 

Even as late as Shakspeare this sense was still vigorous ; 
as — 

' Riji. But Madam, where is Warwicke then become ? 
Gray. I am inform'd that he comes towards London.' 

3 Henry VI. iv, 4. 25. 

In our day where and become will not construe together, 
because the latter has lost all signification of locality. Eithet 
we should ask ' Where is Warwick gone to ? ' or ' What is 
become of Warwick ? ' In short, the word has been tho- 
roughly symboHsed, and so qualified to take the place of our 
lost verb weoi^an. And here again, as in so many other 
places, it has to be observed that we have followed the 
French. It is the French devenir that we give expression to 
(nay, that we mimic) in our modern verb becoine. 

But this is a matter of only superficial importance so far 
as syntax is concerned. What does it matter whether a 
certain function is discharged by weor^an or by devenir? 
it is functions and not roots that structural philology attends 
to. In so far as we construe our become difi"erently from the 
construction of the old weor^an, so far is the change struc- 
tural, and no further. Broadly speaking, the analogues of 
this become have a general resemblance of construction in 
all the great languages, so that the fact of our having changed 
our word under French tuition is a matter of small structural 
consideration. 

. But now we come to a symbol-verb of a peculiarly insular 
character, namely, the auxiliary do. 

This also is French under a Saxon exterior. It is the 
Yrench /aire, as in f aire f aire., ' to cause a thing to be done.' 
And, at first, even in English, its action was just the same 
as is that of the Siuxilmiy /aire to this day in French. Thus 
' dede translate ' (Early English Text Society, Extra Series^ 



SFNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS, 49 1 

vol. i. p. ix.) meant not, as now, our ' did translate/ but 
' caused to be translated/ 

Next it came to figure as a representative or vicegerent 
for any antecedent verb : — 

' A wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will 
do of sacred Scripture.' — John Milton, Areopagitica. 

Then as a symbolic expression of tense, both in affirmative 
and negative sentences. This is its pecuharly English 
function. 

But now it has dropped half its function, for it is not 
used with the affirmative verb unless something more than 
the ordinary force of assertion is required. The affirmative 
and negative verb therefore are thus declined: — 



FFIRMATIVE. 


Negative. 


I wish 


I do not wish 


I wished 


I did not wish 


Go 


Do not go 


If I go 


If I do not go 


If I went 


If I did not go 



Thus we see the affirmative side is clear of this auxiliary. 
Apart from emphasis, it is confined to the negative pro- 
position, and to interrogations : 

Where did you go ? 
What do you think? 

But the earlier usage still holds in provincial dialects, as 
in the following from the Dorset Poems : — 

'Where wide and slow 

The stream did flow, 

And flags did grow and lightly flee, 

Below the grey-leaved withy tree ; 

Whilst clack clack clack from hour to hour 

Did go the mill by cloty Stour.' 



49^ OF SYNTAX. 

How thoroughly this is a word of the modern language, 
and how recently it ascertained its own final place and func- 
tion, may be seen from the following quotation, wherein 
Spenser, a contemporary of Shakspeare, yokes dz'd with a 
verb in the preterite : — 

' Astond he stood, and up his heare did hove.' 

The Faerie Queene, i. 2. 31. 

At present this auxiliary is not used to form tenses of the 
verb to de, but we find it so used in the Ballads and 
Romances. Thus, in I^ger and Grime : — 

' Gryme sayd, " how farr haue wee to that citye 
whereas that Ladyes dwelHng doth bee ? " ' Line 758. 

' " why Sir," said shee, " but is it yee 
that in such great perill here did bee ? " ' Line 788. 

' It was a heauenly Melodye 
for a Knight that did a louer bee.' Line 926, 

The verb do is thus an auxiliary which peculiarly belongs 
to English, though at its start it was a French- borrowed 
plume. But the great bulk of the auxiliaries of our language 
are of home origin and development, and they will be found 
to correspond to the verbal modes of expression which are 
used in German and the other dialects of the Gothic stock. 
I speak of such auxiliaries as shall, will, may, can, let, might, 
could, would, should. An example or two will suffice to 
indicate how greatly we are in a state of contrast with the 
Romanesque tongues on this feature. 



amare 


amero 


aimerai 


I shall or will love. 


ainariamos 


ameremmo 


aimerions 


we should or would love. 


amemos 


amiamo 


aimons 


let us love. 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 



493 



There is yet another feature in the symbolism surromiding 
the verb, in which the English use is in accordance with the 
Gothic languages, and at variance with the Romanesque. 
This is in regard to those adverbs which in the Romanesque 
languages have the habit of prefixing themselves inseparably 
to their verbs. The equivalents of these are not always, but 
for the most part, separate or at least separable in EngHsh 
and German and the Gothic languages generally. This will 
be readily understood by the help of a few examples of this 
contrast between French and English. They are taken from 
Randle Cotgrave, 1611 : — 

Abboyer, to barke or bay at, 
Decourir, to run down. 
Deprier, to pray instantly. 
Descrier, to cry down, 
Entrecouper, to cut between. 
Parservir, to ser/. thoroughly, 
Proteler, to shift off. 
Pourvoir, to provide for, 
Rebouillir, to boil once more, 
Rebouler, to bowle againe. 

If we turn now from the symbolism that surrounds the 
verb, to that which is attendant on the noun, we shall see 
that the latter is most prominently drawn from the articles 
and the prepositions. These are the symbolic satellites of 
the noun. And there is perceivable a certain co-operation 
with one another in their action. When two substantives 
are united by a genitival relation, as ' servus servorum,' 
' Junonis ob iram,' ' haelejja hleo,' ' heofena rice,' ' my 
body's length' (3 Henry VI, v. 2. 26), 'man-kind,' and you 
substitute an qf^OT the genitival flexion, or genitival relation 
of the one noun, you find yourself often obliged to give the 
other noun an article ; thus, ' a servant of servants,' * for 



494 ^^ SFNTAX. 

Juno's wrath' avoiding both preposition and article, — or 
using them both, ' for the wrath of Juno/ ' heroes' shelter,' 
' heroum columen,' or, ' the shelter of heroes,' ' the kingdom 
of heaven,' ' the length of my body,' ' the family of man.' 

If we compare the Versions of 1535 and of 161 1 in 
Daniel i. 2, the elder has ' and there brought them in to his 
gods treasury ; ' but the younger has it ' into the treasure- 
house of his god/ The change of structure from flexional 
to symbolic has thus brought in two symbols to attend on 
the noun — namely, the preposition and the article. 

And this is not the only class of instances in which the 
introduction of one symbolic word provokes a tendency to 
call in another. In the earlier stages of Saxon Hterature 
we find a preposition with a bare noun ; but this is less the 
case in the riper language of the tenth century, and in 
modern English it is (with certain special exceptions) 
altogether inadmissible. 

' Adrifen of biscopdome." 
Driven from the see ; or, from bis see. 

' Of wealle geseah.' 
From the wall he saw. 

The substitution of the preposition instead of the case of 
the noun, has been extended also to the pronoun. Hence 
the variety of phrases, such as o/?jiy own, from thence. 

of itself. 

' Warsaw is not of itself a strong fortress, but it closes the railway and 
defends the passage of the Vistula.' 

And as the pronouns are the great source of conjunctions, 
the latter soon catch this phrasal habit. 

out of which. 

' But those wise and good men whose object it had been all along to save 
what they could of the wreck, out of which to construct another ,ark,' &c. 
— Blunt, History of the Reformation^ ch. ix. 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 495 

This has been felt to be a Frenchism or a classicism, 
and the English humour has never thoroughly liked it. At 
best it is but book-English. It is one of the most salient of 
the features of Addison's style that he asserted the native 
idiom in this particular, as : ' This is the thing which I spoke 
to you of.' This English reluctance to welcome the ' of 
which,' ' to which,' ' from which,' as a conjunction, is to be 
noted as the point where our instincts lead us to resist the 
further progress of the symbolic element. At this point 
there is, however, much vacillation and uncertainty : the 
English ear not being satisfied with either construction. 
The following is from one of Addison's papers in the 
Spectator, No. 499 : — 

' This Morning I received from him the following Letter, which, after 
having rectified some little orthographical Mistakes, I shall make a Present 
of to the Publick.' 

The contact of two such words as 0/ to is not pleasing. 

One of the prepositions has acquired for itself a very 
remarkable function, and that not in attendance on a noun, 
but on a verb. And yet it is a noun also ; it is at the point 
of union between noun and verb, that is to say, the infinitive. 
Here the preposition to has made for itself a permanent 
place, just as at has in Danish, and a (Latin ad) in Walla- 
chian. 



Danish, 


English. 


Wallachian 


at baere 
at skrive 


to bear 
to write 


a purta 
a scrie 



Thus we perceive that the prepositional form of the infinitive 
is not peculiar to English, nor yet to the Gothic, as opposed 
to the Romance family of languages ; but that it springs up 
indifferently under various conditions, and therefore must be 



49^ OF SYNTAX. 

referred to some general tendency. What that tendency is 
I have already surmised in the chapter on the adverbs. 

Modern languages have a continuity of development 
and a flexibility of action, and growing out of these a 
power of following the movements of the mind, such 
as was never attained by the classical languages. If we 
take Demosthenes and Cicero as the maturest products 
of the Greek and Latin languages, we feel that they do not 
attain to the range of the best modern writers, or even to that 
of the fine passages in the prose writings of Milton. Great 
elasticity, great plasticity, has been added to language by 
the development of symbolism ; great acquisitions have been 
made both in the compass and in the go of language. 
This of course displays itself chiefly in the grander oratorical 
efforts. The capacity of a language is seen best in the 
masterly periods of great orators. In our day we have 
heard much praise of short sentences ; and that praise for 
the most part has been well bestowed. The vast majority 
of writers are engaged in the diffusion of knowledge, in 
popularising history or science ; or else they write with the 
avowed purpose of entertaining. Wherever the object is to 
make knowledge easy, or to make reading easy, the short 
sentence is to be commended. But when the mind of an 
original thinker burns with the conception of new thoughts, 
or the mind of the orator is aflame with the enthusiasm of 
new combinations and newly perceived conclusions, it is 
natural for them to overflow in long and elaborately sub- 
ordinated sentences, which tax the powers of the hearer or 
reader to keep up with them. These are among the greatest 
efforts of mind, and their best expression naturally con- 
stitutes the grandest exhibition of the power of human 
speech ; and this power has received great accessions by the 
modern development of symbolism. 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 497 

Short sentences are prevalent in our language, as long ones 
are in the German. In all things we incline to curtness and 
stuntness. Not that this gives the full account of the mat- 
ter. German literature has been far more engaged in the 
acquisition, while English literature has been employed more 
in the diffusion, of knowledge. This is probably the chief 
cause of our short and easy sentences. But we can use the 
cumulate construction when needed, and there are places in 
which force would be lost by dividing it into two or three 
successive and seriatim sentences. The following affords 
a fair example of a cumulative subject. It is all ' subject ' 
down to the words printed in capitals, 

' The houses of the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of this genera- 
tion, at least the country houses, with front-door and back-door always 
standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught always blowing 
through; with all the scrubbing and cleaning and polishing and scouring 
which used to go on ; the grandmothers and still more the great-grand- 
mothers always out of doors and never with a bonnet on except to go to 
church ; these things, when contrasted with our present ' civilized ' habits, 
ENTIRELY ACCOUNT for the fact so often seen of a great-grandmother who 
was a tower of physical vigour, descending into a grandmother perhaps a little 
less vigorous but still sound as a bell and healthy to the core, into a mother 
languid and confined to her carriage and house, and lastly into a daughter 
sickly and confined to her bed.' — Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing. 

He who hopes that his writings may be an agreeable 
accompaniment to tea and bread-and-butter, may well 
adopt as his literary type the conversational sentences of 
Addison, the father of popular English literature, and the 
founder of easy writing for recreative study : — 

' It is with much satisfaction that I hear this great city inquiring day by 
day after these my papfers, and receiving my morning lectures with a becom- 
ing seriousness and attention. My publisher tells me that there are already 
3000 of them distributed every day; so that if I allow twenty readers 
to every paper, which I look upon as a modest computation, I may reckon 
about three score thousand disciples in London and Westminster, who I hope 
will take care to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless herd of their 
ignorant and inattentive brethren. Since I have raised to myself so great an 
audience I shall spare no pains to make their instruction agreeable and their 
diversion useful. For which reasons I shall endeavour to enliven morality wit 

Kk 



498 OF SYNTAX. 

wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both 
ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that 
their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermittent starts of 
thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I 
have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which 
the age is fallen. The mind that lies fallow for a single day sprouts up in 
follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous culture. It was 
said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit 
among men ; and I. shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have 
brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables, and in coffee houses. 

' I would, therefore, in a very particular manner, recommend these my 
speculations to all well-regulated families, that set apart an hour in every 
morning for tea and bread-and-butter ; and would earnestly advise them for 
their good to order this paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked 
upon as a part of the tea equipage.' — Spectator, No. 10. 

But he who wishes for periods that will furnish a mental 
gymnastic, must read page after page of Milton's prose 
works, or of the very dissimilar Jeremy Taylor, where, amidst 
much that is almost chaotic in its irregular massiveness, he 
may from time to time fall in with such a piece of architecture 
as will reward his patient quest. If the following piece from 
the close of Milton's Re/orjiiation in England appears to 
the reader hardly to match this description, it will at least 
serve to give a taste of what a really great sentence can be. 

' Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps 
be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and cele- 
brate Thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout 
all ages, whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the 
fervent and continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far 
from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that high and happy 
emulation to be found the soberest wisest and most Christian people at that 
day, when Thou, the eternal and shortly expected King, shalt open the 
clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and, distributing national 
honours and rewards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end 
to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming Thy universal and mild monarchy 
through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours 
counsels and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion and 
their country, shall receive, above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal 
addition of principalities, legions, and thrones with their glorious titles, and, 
in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble 
circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and bliss, in over- 
measure for ever.' 



SYNTAX BY SYMBOLIC WORDS. 499 

It is a gain to our general literature that the long sentence 
is but rarely used, for it is sorely out of place in ordinary 
writing, such as historical narrative, or any other kind that is 
produced at a moderate temperature. It is the defect of 
Clarendon's style that his sentences are too long for their 
energy. Long sentences are intolerable without enthusiasm. 
It is only under the glow of passion that the highest capabilities 
of a language are displayed. As, however, we are not now 
engaged upon the rhetorical aspect of the language for its 
own sake, but only by way of illustrating the resources of 
modern syjitax for continuous and protracted structure, it 
should be added that to the beauty of the long sentence it is 
not necessary that the passion be at all furious, but only that 
the feeling be strong enough to sustain itself during the flight 
from one resting-place to another. The following four 
stanzas from In Memonani constitute but one period, which 
though quiet enough is yet well sustained \— 



' I past beside the reverend walls 

In which of old I wore the gown ; 
1 roved at random through the town, 
And saw the tumult of the halls; 



And heard once more in college fanes 

The storm their high-built organs make, 
And thunder-music, rolling, shake 

The prophets blazon'd on the panes; 

And caught once more the distant shout, 
The measured pulse of racing oars 
Among the willows ; paced the shores 

And many a bridge, and all about 

The same gray flats again, and felt 

The same, but not the same; and last 
Up that long walk of limes I past 

To see the rooms in which he dwelt,' 

K k 2 



500 OF SYNTAX. 

If we ask, What is this sustaining power, which bears 
along more than a hundred words in one movement, with 
all the unity of an individual organism? the answer is, 
that it is rhythm. The particular notice of rhythm will find 
its place in the last chapter : here, it will be enough to illus- 
trate what manner of thing symbolic syntax is when it is 
without rhythm. 

If we want to see this form of syntax carried out to an 
extreme and exaggerated development, unsupported more- 
over and unbalanced by rhythm, we have only to read a 
legal document, such as a marriage settlement, or a re- 
lease of trust. Often whole lines are mere strings of 
words till the reader's head swims with the fluctuations 
of the unstable element, and, like a man at sea, or in a 
balloon, he longs to plant his feet on terra firma. 

' And that the said sum when paid should be held upon the trusts there- 
inafter declared of and concerning the same.' 

' Four other of the children of the said testator are entitled respectively 
to one other of the remaining four other of the said shares.' 

The following is from a release of trust: — 

* And also of from and against all and all manner of actions and suits 
cause and causes of action and suit reckonings debts duties claims and demands 
whatsoever both at Law and in Equity which they the said releasing and 
covenanting parties or any or either of them their or any or either of their 
heirs executors administrators or assigns or any other person or persons 
whomsoever {sic) claiming or who shall or may at any time hereafter claim 
by from through under or in trust for them him or her or any or either of 
them may or can have claim challenge or demand of from or against the 
said.' 

And so it goes floating on, when it could almost all be said 
by a mere passive verb ; as. The trust is discharged. 



CHAPTER XL 

OF COMPOUNDS. 

In a general way of speaking, compounds are merely 
morsels of syntax which, from being often together, have 
become adherent, and have grown into something between 
phrases and words. A mature language makes fresh com- 
pounds after the pattern established ; but the origin of the 
pattern is to be sought in the habits, often the earlier habits, 
of the syntactical structure. Compounds vary extremely as 
regards laxity and compactness of fabric. When first made 
they are very lax, and hardly to be distinguished as com- 
pounds from words in syntax. Such loose compounds are 
daily made by little more than the trick of inserting hyphens. 
In the Cornhill Magazine a writer upon rhetoric designates 
a certain style of diction as the allude-to-an-individual style. 

In those languages which have a ready faculty of com- 
pound-making, this sort of off-hand compound has always 
been one of the recognised means of being funny. Passing 
over this sort, which are hardly to be ranged as compounds 
at all, we have such loose examples 2i?, forget-me-not, and 
such compact examples as mankind, nostril, boatswain, which 
through long use are so well knit as to be more like simple 



502 OF COMPOUNDS. 

words than compounds. The compound state, properly so 
called, is an intermediate condition between the phrase and 
the word ; a transition which the phrase passes through in 
order to become gradually condensed into a simple word. 
We are of old familiar with the grammatical idea that phrases 
are made out of words, but we now recognise that the 
reverse of this is also true, and that words are made out of 
phrases. • 

The distinctive condition which marks that a compound 
has been formed, is the change of accent. The difference 
between ' black bird ' and ' blackbird ' is one of accent. Or, 
when it is stated of a horse that he is 'two years old/ each 
of these words has its own several tone. But make a 
trisyllable of it, and say ' a two-year-old,' and the sound is 
greatly altered. The second and third words lean enclitic- 
ally upon the first, while the first has gathered up all the 
smartness of tone into itself, and goes off almost like the 
snap of a trigger. The written sign which is used to signify 
that a compound is intended, is the hyphen; which may 
therefore be regarded as being indirectly a note of accent. 

This is the reason why the hyphen is so much more used 
in poetry than in prose. The poet is attending to his 
cadences, and therefore feels the need of the accentual sign 
of the hyphen. Our prose (on the other hand) is sprinkled 
with compounds which are written as if they were in construc- 
tion. There is no need to search for examples, they offer 
themselves on the page of the moment. On the page that 
happens to be under my eye, I find two compounds, one of 
the first and one of the second order ; both without hyphens. 

coas/-h'ne. 

' Indeed these old coal layers call to mind our peat bogs. We find a layer 
of peat nearly everywhere on our coast line between high and low water 
mark.' 



OF COMPOUNDS. 503 

I think most people would read coal layers and peal dogs as 
compounds also ; but on these there might be a difference of 
opinion. The same may be said of millslone gril in the next 
quotation. But there can be no doubt as to 

coal-producing. 

' You know that if you heat a poker, it expands ; the heat making it 
longer. The earth is in the same state as a hot poker, and parts of it expand 
or contract as the heat within it ebbs and flows. I have here a section of the 
coal measures of Lancashire. Upon a thick base of millstone g'rit, of which 
most of our hills are composed, you have the coal producing rocks, which, 
instead of being horizontal as they were originally, have been tilted up.' — 
W. Boyd Dawkins, On Coal. 

An incident which attends upon the act of compounding 
is this, — that the old grammatical habit of the final member is 
subjected to the grammatical idea of the new compound. 
Any parts of speech will assume in compounding the sub- 
stantive character, and will pluralise as such. Th.\xsforgel- 
me-nol, plural forget-me-nots. I remember a quaker lady, 
who, with the grave and gentle dignity that formed part of 
her beautiful character, disapproved of chimney-ornaments, 
on the ground that they were need-nots. A plural form, on 
entering into composition, takes a new character as a singular, 
and withal a new power of receiving a new plurality. Thus, 
sixpence, plural sixpences. 

Inasmuch then as compounds are in their nature and origin 
nothing but fragments of structure in a state of cohesion, it 
follows that they will most naturally be classified according 
to the divisions of syntax. And although a precise classifi- 
cation may hardly be practicable, owing to the vast play of 
fancy, and the consequent inter-crossing of the kinds of 
compounds, yet we shall experience in following such a 
division some of that practical convenience which attends a 
method that is substantially true to nature. The relation 
between the parts of a compound is expressed either by the 



504 



OF COMPOUNDS. 



relative position of the parts, as in the difference between 
pathfield, racehorse, 2ir\di fieldpath, horserace ; or by an inflec- 
tion of one of the parts, as in suhtle-cadenced ; or by the 
intervention of a symbolic word, as in man-of-war, hread- 
and-cheese. We will speak of these three as Compounds of 
the First Order, Compounds of the Second Order, and 
Compounds of the Third Order. 



I. Compounds of the First Order. 

'■ The most prevalent means by which compounds are made 
is by mere juxtaposition. This is the case in many im- 
portant languages besides English. In Hebrew for example, 
Beer signifies a well, and Sheba signifies an oath ; and when 
these two are put together, we have the' name Beersheba, 
which means the well of the oath. But in the true English 
analogue the positions of the parts would be reversed, and 
it would stand as Oath-well. In Welsh the order is the same 
as in Hebrew, and the reverse of the EngHsh order. Thus 
Llan is church, and Fair is an altered form of Mair, which is 
Mary, and the Welsh express Mary-church in the reverse 
order, Llanfair. In all these instances the compound fol- 
lows the order usual in the syntactical construction of each 
language. 

But our English order of juxtaposition is the most widely 
adopted, and it may be regarded as the most natural. The 
famous collection of ancient Sanskrit hymns is called the 
Rig-Veda, and this title answers part for part to our ' Hymn- 
book.' 

The general principle of the compounds of the first order 
is this, — that two words are united, with the understanding 



COMPOUNDS OF THE FIRST ORDER. 



505 



that the first is adjectival or adverbial to the second ; in other 
words, the second is principal and the first modificatory. 
The simplest examples are those which are made of an 
adjective and a substantive, as hlackhird. The most cha- 
racteristic are those which are made of two nouns, the first 
acting as an adjective. Such are the following : — 



air-balloon 


main-spring 


alder-bush 


marsh-mallow 


bed-stead 


nine-pins 


bell-wire 


nut-cracker 


boat-swain 


oak-apple 


cart-horse 


packe-horse (Shakspeare) 


clock-work 


park-paling 


coal-scuttle 


pig-nut 


dog-kennel 


prize-03^ 


edge-tool 


quern-stone 


fire-balloon 


rick-yard 


fish-wife 


ring-leader 


gift-horse 


sail-yard 


girl-graduates (Tennyson) 


ship-mate 


goat-herd 


spindle-whorl 


hand-loom 


tar-barrel 


hearth- stone 


time-piece 


heir- loom 


town-clerk 


horse-box 


upas-tree 


ingle-nook 


vine-yard 


ink-horn 


war-horse 


king-cup 


water-hole (Australia) 


lamp-oil 


yeaning-time 


loop-hole 


yoke-fellow 



This is the sort of compound for which the German lan- 
guage is so distinguished. The flat syntax has disappeared 
from that language, and it has gone to swell the numbers of 
their flat compounds. Examples are such as ^anb^fcf^u^ 
(hand-shoe), glove; B^ingcr^ut (finger-hat), thimble; (£rb=funbe 
(earth-knowledge), geography; @^rac^4c^re, speech-lore. 

There is so close an affinity between the German and 
English compounds of the first order, that the one will 
occasionally supply a comment on the other. 

Handywork affords an example of this. As we find it 



5o6 



OF COMPOUNDS. 



printed, it has the appearance of our adjective handy com- 
bined with a substantive work. But the German «§anbti3erf 
suggests a truer etymology. It consists, in fact, of two sub- 
stantives, namely i^^;z^ zndi geweorc, or (medisevally) ywork ; 
so that it would be more correctly written thus, hand-ywork. 
But if this looks too archaic, it should be spelt handiwork, as 
indeed it is given in Dr. Latham's edition of Johnson's 
Dictionary. The Saxon original is found in Deuteronomy 
iv. 28 :— 

' And ge ])eowia}) fremdum godum, And ye (shall) serve foreign gods, 

manna hand geweorc, treowene and men's handiwork, tree-en and stonen, 

staenene, ])a ne geseoj), ne ne gehiraj), that see not, nor hear ; and they eat 

ne hig ne eta|), ne hig ne drinca]).' not, and drink not. 

Other Saxon compounds there are of the same mould, but 
none that have so nearly preserved their original form as 
handiwork has. One of these was hand gewrit, which has 
been turned into handwriting. There is no hyphen in 
Saxon manuscripts, but words that have an accentual at- 
traction were often written somewhat nearer to one another. 
In the text of my Saxon Chronicles, this is represented by a 
half-distance, where the originals justify it. Some words 
were thus divided in two, which have coalesced since. 



A.D. 47; 


. (K) here reaf 


army-spoil 


495 


aldormen 


chief-men 


514 


WestSeaxe 


West-Saxons 


633 


biscepsetl 


bishop-seat 


643 


Cenwalh. 




648 


Cu>red. 




660 


biscepdom 


bishopric 


676 


Centlond 


Kent-land 


704 


munuchad 


monk-hood 


738 


Eoforwic 


York 


755 


godsunu 


godson 


773 


set] gong 


setting (of sun) 


823 


Ecgbryht 




832 


Sceapige 


Sheppey 


833 


waelstow 


battle-ground 


8k I 


healfhund 


half-hundred 



COMPOUNDS OF THE FIRST ORDER. 



507 



• 853- 


biscepsunu 


god-son 




monigmon 


many-a-man 


855- 


hamweard 


homeward 




healfgear 


half-year 


866. 


winter setl 


winter-quarters 


871. 


wael sliht 


battle-slaughter 


878. 


morfaesten 


moor-fastness 




crismlising 


chrysom-loosing 


882. 


sciphlsestas 


ship-loads 


887. 


bro|}orsunu 


nephew (lit. brother-son) 




folcgefeoht 


folk-fight 


891. 


boclasden 


book-Latin 


894. 


herehy'S 


army-stuff 


896. 


stalwyrS 


stal worth 


921. 


mundbora 


protector 


933. 


land here 


land-array 




sciphere 


ship-array 


937- 


beah gifa 


badge-giver 




garmitting 


spear-meeting 




wsepen gewrixl 


weapon-wrestling 




wslfeld 


battle-field. 



The following have an adjective (or participle) in the second 
place, and the same relation holds good between the parts ; 
for the first part, whatever its habit as a part of speech, is 
still the subordinate and modificatory of the two : — 

spedacle-hestrid. 

' Misled by custom, strain celestial themes 
Through the pressed nostril, spectacle-bestrid.' - 

William Cowper, The Timepiece. 



blood-thirsty 

fancy-free (Shakspeare) 

full-blown 

foot-sore 

heart-sick 

heart-weary 

The following are Tennysonian : — 

five-words-long 
love-loyal 



heart-whole 

life-long 

rathe-ripe 

thunder-struck 

weather-wise 



mock-solemn 
maiden-meek 



In these compounds each part retains its presentive sig- 
nification, although the one part is subordinated to the other 



5o8 OF COMPOUNDS. 

in the act of producing a united sense. This subordination 
is expressed by an accentual elevation whereby the specific 
word is raised into a sharp prominence, while the generic 
word is let down»to a low tone. There are some exceptions, 
as in the word man- kind ; but the general rule is that the 
accent strikes the first or specific part of the compound. 
This is not the place to speak of accents, any further than 
just to notice that the accent indicates where is the stress of 
thought. This will be found to explain the occasional 
exception. 

Out of composition has grown, and by insensible modifi- 
cations developed itself, that phenomenon so interesting to 
the philologer, and so frequent in his discourse, namely. 
Flexion. The origin of flexion appertains to this eldest 
group of compounds ; but for the action and behaviour of 
flexion when once established, we may go to the second 
or middle order of compounds ; and indeed, we may speak 
more generally, and say: — Flexion occupies the middle zone 
of the whole sphere of human language as it is historically 
known to us. 

A slight indication of the process is all that can be at- 
tempted in this place. 

The chief attention being usually fixed on the fore-part 
of the compound, the after-part is left free to undergo 
alteration. This has been attended with remarkable con- 
sequences, in certain instances, where the termination was 
already of a widely generic character. The slighting of the 
tone and the generalisation of the sense, go on together 
and favour one another. At length the termination reaches 
a symboHc value, and we obtain those forms in which the 
after-part is merely an abstract or collective sign to the fore- 
part; as childhood, friendship, happiness, kingdom, kindred, 
warfare, wedlock. 



COMPOUNDS OF THE FIRST ORDER. 509 

Other cases there are in which the second part passes into 
a sort of adjectival or adverbial termination ; as graceful, 
careless, froward, contrariwise. 

So far we can still regard these as a sort of compounds. 
But the symbolising process goes on, and with it the waning 
of the form of the second part, until we are landed in 
flexion : thus from good-like we at length get goodly. 

Such are the steps whereby composition passes into 
terminal flexion. But there is a sort of flexion which is 
initial, which takes place at the beginning of a word. And 
to see how this comes about, we must consider another 
group of compounds. These are they in which the fore- 
part is an adverb or preposition, as beco7?ie, belong, forego, 
foreshorten, forlorn, forward, mistake^ purblind, undo, with- 
stand. 

fore-right. 

* If well thou hast begun, go on fore-right.' 

Robert Herrick. 

In these the attention as well as the accent is m-ostly on 
the second part, and as a consequence the first part, being 
symbolised to begin with, passes soon into the higher sym- 
bolism, which constitutes flexion. The whole class of prefixes 
(as they are called) lie in the region between compounds 
and flexion. When the prefix comes to be so destitute of 
separate meaning as is the a- in the following instances, 
we may then regard it as an inflection of the word to which 
it is prefixed : — ajar, akin, along, aloud, away, afield, aright, 
afar, astir, abed, athwart. This is a favourite strain of 
words in the seafaring life, as ahead, astern, alongside, aback, 
abaft, aloof aloft, aboard, ashore, aground, afloat. 

alow, aloft. 

Stunsails alow and aloft! said he, 
As soon as the foe he saw.' 

John Harrison, Three Ballads. 



5IO OF COMPOUNDS. 

A very large majority of the words of a mature language, 
if we could analyse them correctly, would be found to dis- 
solve into phrases. So that we may reverse the ordinary 
grammatical view whereby words are regarded as the material 
of sentences; and we should be philologically justified in 
this seeming paradox : — The Seiitence is the raw material of 
the Word. 



11. Compounds of the Second Order. 

This group consists of those in which the connection of 
the parts of the compound is indicated by flexion. Many 
compounds have flexion without belonging to this group, 
2^s/ar-seeifig, which I should range with the previous group. 
But when the inflection is applied in such a manner as to 
belong only to the combination and not to the latter part 
by itself, then we have a flexional compound of the most 
distinct kind. In the above example, seeing is equally an 
inflected word whether it be in or out of the compound, and 
the 'ing has no more special relation to the compound than 
the -ful has in the compound all-powerful. But if we take 
long-legged, this is a flexional compound. It is not a com- 
bination of long and legged, but rather of long and leg or legs, 
which are clamped together into one formation by the par- 
ticipial inflection. 

rock-thwarted. 

* One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 
You seem'd to hear them climb and fall, 
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 
Beneath the windy waU.' 

Alfred Tennyson, The Palace of Art. 



COMPOUNDS OF THE SECOND ORDER. 511 

Such are the following, of which the less common are 
marked with the initials of Milton or Tennyson : — 

arrow-wounded (T) large-moulded (T) 

bare-headed lily-handed (T) 

broad-shouldered meek-eyed (M) 

bush-bearded (T) neat-handed (M) 

crest-fallen open-hearted 

cross-barred (M) pure-eyed (M) 

deep-throated (M) royal-towered (M) 

. eagle-eyed (M) self-involved (T) 

fair-haired serpent-throated (T) 

far-fetched sinew-corded (T) 

golden-shafted (T) thick-leaved (T) 

hard-grained (T) vermeil-tinctured (M) 

high-toned white-handed (M) 
icy-pearled (M) 

This class of compomids is seen in its highest perfection 
in the Greek language, and the authors who have used this 
form of speech with the greatest effect and in the most op- 
posite ways are vEschylus and Aristophanes. What was a 
trumpet to the former was employed as a bauble by the 
latter. Our modern poets are great performers upon this 
instrument. Keats handled it very effectively. In his 
Endymion we read of ' yellow-girted bees ' ; also 

suhtle-cadenced. 

' Twas a lay 
More subtle-cadenced, more forest wild 
Than Dryope's lone lulling of her child.' Id. 

lidless-eyed. 

'Whereat, methought, the lidless-eyed train 
Of planets all were in the blue again.' Id. 

Also Mr. Robert Browning may well be quoted to illus- 
trate this fondness : — 

billowy-bosomed. 

' Hush ! if you saw some western cloud 
All billowy-bosomed, overbowed 
By many benedictions.' 



512 ■ OF COMPOUNDS. 

fawn-skin-dappled. 
' That fawn-skin-dappled hair of hers.' 

Others by the same poet : honey-coloured, fruit-shaped, 
fairy-cupped, elf-needled. 

One from a still more recent poem : — 

country-featured. 

• And all glad things were welcome in thy sight, 
Save the glad air of heaven ; all things bright. 
Save the bright light of day ; and all things sweet, 
Save country-featured Truth and Honesty : 
All these thou didst abolish from thy seat, 
Because these things were free.* 

Robert Buchanan, Napoleon Fallen, 1870. 

In such instances the inflection reacts on the whole com- 
pound with a consolidating force. Several words may thus 
be strung together. When the last member of a linked 
composite has an inflection, it seems to run back pervadingly 
through the others, supplying the whole with a thread of 
coherence. We do not use this power so much as the 
Germans do. Richard Rothe said of his student life at 
Heidelberg, that it was ein ^oetifc§=retigiog=njiffettc§aftlic^eg 

In the following quotation, though it is not so printed, 
yet the word old is part of the compound. 

oldfriend-ish-ness. 

* The author having settled within himself the most direct mode of securing 
the ear of his readers, throws himself upon their favour with an air of trust- 
fulness and old friend-ish-ness, which cannot fail to secure him welcome and 
audience.' — Quarterly Review, vol. cxxviii. p. 545. 

Here also seem to belong those instances in which the 
last member is a present participle, governing the former 
members of the compound : 

' As a tool-and-weapon-using being, man stands alone,' — E. T. Stevens, 
Flint Chips, Preface. 



COMPOUNDS OF THE THIRD ORDER. 513 

hovie-enfolding. 

' The lonely wand'rer under other skies 

Thinks on the happy fields he may not see. 
The home-enfolding landscape seems to rise 
With sunlight on the lea.' 

Horace Smith. 

Indeed, wherever there is a verbal government between 
the parts of a compound, I would reckon that compound as 
belonging to this section, because rection, though not neces- 
sarily connected with flexion, has ever been found as its 
close companion and ally. In the above examples, we have 
however an unequivocal trace of the work of flexion, in the 
displacement of the governed word and its being put before 
the verb. But even where such grounds are wanting, if 
only government exists between the parts, I should regard 
it (at least in our own language) as presumable that the 
compound had its roots in a former state of flexional syntax. 
Accordingly, I range here such compounds as makeshift^ 
makeweight^ viakehelieve, marplot, pickpocket, pickpurse, pick- 
thank. 



III. Compounds of the Third Ordee. 

Here belong all those compounds which are formed by 
an accentual union of phrases wherein the syntactical con- 
nection is entirely or mainly symbolic. There was a 
mediaeval English expression for vain regret, which was 
made up of the words ' had I wist,' that is to say, ' Oh, if 
I had only known what the consequence would be.' It was 
variously written, and the variations depend on the degree 
of accentual intensification : — 
H 



514 OF COMPOUNDS. 

hadde-y-wiste. 
' And kepe ])e well from hadde-y-wiste.' 
Babees Book, p. 15, ed. Furnivall, Early English Text Society. 

/iad}>-zvj's/. 

' When dede is doun hit ys to lat ; 
be ware of hady-wyst.' 

The chief symbol which threads together these com- 
pounds is the preposition ' of,' as will-d -the-wisp, cat-d -nine- 
tails, man-of-war, lighi-d-love. 

The distinction between compounds and constructs is a 
dehcate one, so much so that two persons of Hke birth and 
education may be found to differ upon it. When however 
we see the of abraded to d , or when we hear it in speech, 
as we often hear man-d-war, then there is no doubt of the 
compound state of that expression. 

This class of compounds is essentially French, and it is 
from our neighbours that we have caught the art of making 
them. Thus, we say after them : — 

mot-d'ordre word-of-command 

point-d'honneur point-of-honour 

But the instances in which we make use of it are far less 
numerous than those in which we keep to our natural com- 
pound, that of the first order. It is only necessary to offer 
a few examples by which it will appear how very far we are 
from overtaking the French in the use of their compound : — 

chef-d'oeuvre master-piece 

maison-de-campagne country-house 

chemin-de-fer rail-road 

bonnet-de-nuit night-cap 

tete-de-pavot poppy-head 

culottes-de-peluche plush-breeches 

Bureau-de-Poste Post-OfEce 



COMPOUNDS OF THE THIRD ORDER. 515 

And if we are slow to adopt their compounds with de, 
still less do we concern ourselves to imitate those which 
they so readily make with other prepositions ; as : — 

arc-en-ciel rain-bow 

verre a vin wine-glass 

manche a balai broom-stick 

So strong is our preference for our own old hereditary 
compound, that even where we substantially adopt the ex- 
pression of a French compound, we alter it to the world-old 
form, as in the case of coup-de-Bourse, which in the following 
newspaper-cutting is turned into 

Exchange-stroke, 

' Secretary Boutwell was in New York almost on the eve of the outbreak. 
He was aware, as indeed the whole city was, that a conspiracy was brewing 
— that what we might call an " Exchange stroke " was contemplated.' 

The transition from the construct to the compound state 
is a slight and delicate thing, but it takes time to accomplish. 
The symbolic syntax has produced few as yet ; the flexional 
syntax has produced far more, for the compounds of the 
second order have been greatly fostered by the study of 
Greek. But the great shoal of Enghsh compounds is 
derived from the eldest form of syntax, and they have their 
roots in a time immeasurably old. They claim kindred with 
Red-Indian compounds like Tso-?nec-cos-fee and Tso-me-cos- 
te-won-dee and Pah-puk-kee'na and Pah-Puk-Kee'wis and 
other such, of which the ready and popular repertory is the 
Song of Hiawatha. 



Ll 2 



CHAPTER XII. 

OF PROSODY, OR THE MUSICAL ELEMENT IN 
SPEECH. 

' Point not these mysteries to an Art 
Lodged above the starry pole ; 
Pure modulations flowing from the heart 
Of divine Love, where Wisdom, Beauty, Truth, 
With Order dwell, in endless youth ? ' 

William Wordsworth, On the Power of Sound. 

The first of these chapters was on the Alphabet, out of 
which, by a multiplicity of combinations, a conventional 
garb has been devised for the visible representation of lan- 
guage. By the artifice of literature, speech is presented to 
the eye as an object of sight. Partly in consequence of 
the pains which we are at to acquire literary culture ; partly 
also, perhaps, in consequence of the greater permanency of 
the visual impressions upon the mind ; — certain it is, that the 
cultivated modern is apt to think of language rather as a 
written than as a spoken thing. And this, although he still 
makes far greater use of it by the oral than by the literary 
process. It is, however, quite plain that writing is but an 
external and necessarily imperfect vesture, while the true 
and natural and real form of language is that which is made 
of sound, and addressed to the ear. 



OF PROSODY. 517 

Human speech consists of two essential elements, and 
these are Voice and Meaning. I say ' meaning ' rather than 
' thought/ because it seems a more comprehensive term, in- 
cluding the whole sphere of emotion, from its innermost and 
least explored centre to its outermost frontiers in physical 
sensation. 

Voice will, moreover, be found to consist of two parts, 
by a distinction worthy to be observed. For, in the first 
place, there is the voice which is the necessary vehicle of 
the meaning; and, in the second place, there is the voice 
which forms a harmonious accompaniment to the meaning. 
It is the former of these which is represented in literature ; 
for the latter literature is almost silent. Here the mechan- 
ical arts of writing and printing can do but little. 

' One may put her words down, and remember them, but how describe 
her sweet tones, sweeter than musick?' — W. M. Thackeray, E&7nond, 
Bk. ii. ch. XV. 

Poetry, which is the highest form of literature, makes 
great efforts to express this finest part of the voicing of 
language. All the peculiar characteristics of poetry, such 
as verse, rhythm, metre, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, are 
directed towards this end. In prose this is only faintly and 
remotely indicated by such means as punctuation and italics 
and parentheses. But the distinction here drawn applies 
to prose as well as to poetry. It is perfectly well known, 
and generally recognised. It lies at the base of the demand 
for ' good reading.' A man may articulate every word, pro- 
nounce faultlessly, read fluently, and observe the punctuation, 
and yet be far from a good reader. So much of voice as 
is the vehicle of sense is given, but the harmony is wanting, 
and there is no pleasure in Hstening to him. It is felt that, 
besides the sound which conveys the sense of the words, 
there is a further and a different kind of sound due as an 



5l8 OF PROSODY. 

illustrative accompaniment, and it is the rendering of this 
which crowns the performance of the good reader, as it is 
the perception of this which constitutes the appreciative 
listener. 

Or again. Consider the sound of a passionless Oh as 
it might be uttered by a schoolboy in a compulsory reading 
lesson, and then consider the infinite shades of meaning of 
which this interjection is capable under the emotional vibra- 
tions of the voice, and we must acknowledge that the dis- 
tinction between these two elements of vocal sound is of 
a character likely to be attended with philological con- 
sequences. 

Of sound as the necessary vehicle of speech, and as the 
passive material of those phenomena which our science is 
concerned to investigate, we have already treated in the 
first and second chapters. But of sound as bearing an ac- 
cordant, concentive, illustrative part, as being an outer 
harmony and counter-tenor to the strains of the inner 
meaning ; of sound as an illustrative, a formative, and 
almost a creative power in the region of language, we must 
endeavour to render some account in this concluding chapter. 

The distinction here urged is akin to that which is me- 
chanically effected by the musical instrument maker. A 
musical note on an instrument is a natural sound from 
which another sort of sound, namely that which we call 
7toise, has been eliminated. All mechanical collision pro- 
duces sound, and that sound is ordinarily of a complex kind, 
being in fact a noise with which a musical note is con- 
fusedly blended. It is the work of art to contrive me- 
chanical means whereby these two things may be parted, so 
that the musical notes which give pleasure may be placed 
at the command of men. What he does physically, we may 
do mentally. We may separate in our minds between the 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 519 

mere brute sound necessary to speech, and that musical 
tone which more or less blends with it according to the 
temper and quality of various voices. The latter is a sove- 
reign agency in the illustration and formation and develop- 
ment of language, and this is the Sound of which the present 
chapter treats. 



I. Of Sound as an Illustrative Agency. 

The modulatory accompaniment of speech is not un- 
worthy of comparison with music, although it is far more 
restricted in the range of its elevations and depressions. If 
its ups and downs are altogether on a smaller scale, if its 
motions are more subdued and less brilliant, yet, on the other 
hand, it has an advantage in the extent of its province. 
Music is the exponent of emotion only ; it cannot be said 
to have any share in the expression or illustration of 
thought intellectual. Now speech-tones are in force over 
the whole area of human cognisance and feeling ; they are 
coincident with the whole extent of meaning. They are 
emphatically the illustration of meaning. 

As music is made of two elements, time and tune, so also 
is the modulation of speech. Time is expressed in quantity ; 
and tune, or rather tone (which is the rudiment of tune), 
is embodied in accent. Our grammatical systems now take 
little heed of quantity, except as a poetical regulator in 
classical literature. The poetry of the classics was measured 
by quantity; that of the moderns is measured by accent. 
The period at which quantity was consciously and studiously 
observed as an element of ordinary speech, must have been 
very remote. Perhaps we may even venture speculatively 



530 OF PROSODY. 

to regard quantity as the speech-note of that primitive period 
before the rise of flexion, when language was (as it still is 
in some respectable nations) syllabic or agglutinative. We 
know from a thousand experiences how conservative poetry 
is, and we may reasonably imagine that the quantitive 
measure of Greek poetry had descended with a continuous 
stream of song from high antiquity. With the decay of the 
Roman empire it ceased to be a regulative principle even 
in poetry, and from that time accent has been foremost, as 
it had previously been in the background. We must not 
suppose the principle of quantity to be extinct ; but it is no 
longer formulated ; it is absorbed into that general swelling 
and flowing movement of language which is known under 
the somewhat vague name of rhythm. 

Leaving quantity then, we proceed to consider the illus- 
trative value of accent. 

In the first place, accent appears as the ally and colleague 
of sense in the structure of words. In the first order of 
compounds we have to do with words like the following : 
— ash-house, bake-house, brew-house, wood-house. In these 
words the accent is on the predicate. That is to say, the 
stress of sound falls on that member of the word which 
bears the burden of the meaning. That which is asserted 
in those words is not house, but ash, bake, brew, wood. 
House is the subject or thing spoken of, and that which is 
asserted concerning it is contained in the word prefixed. 
x\nd this word or syllable is signalised, as with a flag, by 
having the accent upon it. 

There is a diff"erence between good 7nan and goodman. 
The difference in the sense ought to be rendered by a dis- 
tinction in the sound. Good man is a spondee : good- 
man is a trochee. The latter means a man, not who is 
good (adjective), but a man who is master of the good (sub- 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 5 21 

stantive), i.e. of the household or property. Randle 
Cotgrave (16 11), under the word ' Maistre/ says, towards 
the close of his definition — 

' A Iso, a title of honour {such as it is) belonging to all artificers, and 
tradesmen; whence Maistre Pierre, Maistre Jehan, &c. ; which we giue not 
so generally, but qualifie ihe mea?ier sort of them (especially in countrey 
townes) with the title of Goodman {too good for many)' 

This illustration is useful for the English reader towards 
the understanding of Matthew xx. 11 — 

' And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman 
of the house ; ' 

which, in the Geneva Bible of 1560, is thus rendered : — 

' And when they had received it, they murmured against the master of 
the house.' 

It is not always that we hear this word properly pro- 
nounced in church; and our Bibles, from 16 11 down nearly 
to our own time, appear to have printed it erroneously. 
The reprint of 161 1 itself has 'good man' in two words. 
The handsome folio Baskerville of 1763 has it in the same 
manner. But in the modern prints of the last thirty years 
this has been set right, and it may be hoped that the true 
vocal rendering will also be restored by and by. 

The fact is, the early printers did not attend to these 
minutiae. As a rule they left such matters to the intelli- 
gence of the reader. In the first folio of Shakspeare, Love's 
Labour's Lost, i. i. 289, it is printed, ' He lay my head to any 
good mans hat,' where, plainly, the meaning is ' goodman's 
hat,' as suggested in the Cambridge edition. And it is 
astonishing to find that such a critic as Capell should have 
proposed to correct as follows : — * I'll lay my head to any 
man's good hat,' prosaically deeming that, for the purpose 
of the wager, the goodness of the hat was of more import- 
than that of its wearer. 



S22 OF PROSODY. 

Just in the same manner chapman has the accent on the 
first syllable. The meaning of this word is a man engaged 
in chaffare, or merchandise. It is of the same family of 
words as Cheapside, which means market-side. It occurs in 
another form in Chippenham, Chipping Norton, and Copen- 
hagen. It is still the standard word in German for a mer- 
chant, ^aufmann. But when the French word had occupied 
the foremost place in English, the native word chapman fell 
into homelier use. This may be seen in the following 
quotation, which exhibits also the accentuation of the word 
on its first or determinating syllable : — 

' Beauty is bought by iudgement of the eye, 
Not uttred by base sale of chapmens tongues.' 

Loves Labours, Lost, ii. I. 15. 

Considering the relation of thought which exists between 
the two parts of a compound, it is plain that there is a har- 
mony between the thought and the sound, when the first 
or specific part of the compound is distinguished in the 
accentuation. We have hitherto noticed only the instance 
of a compound consisting of two monosyllabic words, as good- 
mafi, blackbird. But where the first element of the compound 
has more than one syllable, there we find a secondary accent 
rests upon the after, or generic part ; or, if it cannot be said 
to have an accent, it recovers its full tone, as water-course, 
or in Crabbe's expressions of Whitechapel-bred, lonely-wood. 

' His, a lone house, by Deadman's dyke-way stood ; 
And his, a nightly haunt, in Lonely-wood.' 

Sometimes we fall in with a triple compound, with its 
three storeys or stages of accentuation forming a little 
cascade of gradations, as Spenser's holy-water-sprinckle in 
the following lines : — 

' She alway smyld, and in her hand did hold 
An holy-water-sprinckle, dipt in deowe, 
With which she sprinckled favours manifold.' 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 523 

The habit of putting the specific or predicative part of 
a compound first, and the habit which leads us to throw our 
accents back on the former part of a long word, are plainly 
to be regarded as an example of harmonious action between 
the intelligence and the sentiency of the mind. 

Even when the reasons arising from the structure of a 
word are no longer present, there is a tendency to pursue 
the track which habit has created, and to throw the accent 
back. Many a word of French origin has thrown its accent 
back according to this English principle of accentuation. 
Here we are able to give an illustration in which Shak- 
speare's spelling represents his pronunciation. One of the 
difficulties of dealing with the whole subject of sound in 
language arises from the imperfections of orthography. 
Spelling is so traditional, and gives us so little information 
of the shades of pronunciation, that when we do get a 
little light from this niggard source, we may value it the 
more highly. In Richard II. we have the word revenues, 
and the larger number of the early prints spell it with nn. 
But some even of the quartos spell it with a single n ac- 
cording to the modern pronunciation. And if we look at 
the line we find that the modern pronunciation is that which 
reads most smoothly. So that it appears as if the diversity 
of spelling in this place was due to a conflict between the 
French and English manner of pronouncing the word. 

' Towards our assistance, we do seize to us 
The plate, coine, reuennewes, and moueables, 
Whereof our Uncle Gaunt did stand possest.' 

Richard //. ii. i. 161. 

Many a word has had its accent moved a syllable further 
back within the period of the last generation. The protest 
of the poet Rogers has often been quoted, — ^Contemplate,' 



534 Oi^ PROSODF. 

said he, 'is bad enough, but hdlcony makes me sick.' Now- 
a-days contemplate is the usual pronunciation. It was already 
so accented by Wordsworth. 

' The good and evil are our own : and we 
Are that which we would contemplate from far.' 

The Excursion, Bk. v. 

The elder pronunciation is indeed still used in poetry, as 
' When I contemplate all alone.' In Memoriam, Ixxxii. 
' Contemplating her own unworthiness.' 

Enid (1859), P- 29- 

The pronunciation of balcony^ which seemed such an 
abomination to Rogers, is now the only pronunciation that 
is extant. The modern reader oi John Gilpin^ if he reads 
with his ear as well as his eye, is absolutely taken aback 
when he comes upon balcony in the following verse : — 

' At Edmonton, his loving wife 
From the balcony spied 
Her tender husband, wondering much 
To see how he did ride.' 

We often find the Americans outrunning us in our 
national tendencies. There are many instances in which 
they have thrown the accent back one syllable further than 
is usual in the old country. When we speak of St. Augus- 
tine, we put the accent on the second syllable, and we have 
no idea of any other pronunciation. But in the following 
verse by Longfellow we have the name accented on the first 
syllable. 

' Saint Augustine ! well hast thou said, 
That of our vices we can frame 
A ladder, if we will but tread 

Beneath our feet each deed of shame ! ' 

In the same way they say invalid, partisan, not for the 
ancient weapon ' pertuisan,' but for the more familiar word ; 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. ^2^ 

and I am informed by Mr. Fraser ^ that they also pronounce 
resources in a manner that would suggest the union of the 
French spelling of the word ressources, with the English 
trisyllabic pronunciation. 

And here it may be noticed that there is to be found in 
English country places an excess of clustering words together 
in pronunciation, beyond anything that is acknowledged in 
the standard language. I often find it hard to understand 
the name of a rustic child, because the child utters Christian 
and surname together as one word. One little girl I well 
remember how she puzzled me by repeatedly telling me she 
was called ' An ook.' I had to make further enquiries before 
I learnt that this represented Ann Hook. 

The following instance is not the less to our purpose, 
because it is borrowed from fiction. I can myself confirm 
its fidelity. It is useful here, and it adds this circumstance, 
that the peculiar pronunciation is not from rustic lips, but 
comes from a lady : — 

' However, Miss Max had adopted Jameskennet (she always said the 
name as one word), and he had been a great comfort to them all.' — L. 
Knatchbull-Hugessen, The Affirmative (Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1 8 70). 

Hitherto we have been chiefly concerned with that inter- 
pretative power of sound which we call accent. We must 
now distinguish between accent and emphasis. 

Accent is that elevation of the voice which distinguishes 
one part of a word from another, as in the compounds 
exemplified above. 

Emphasis is the distinction made between one word and 
another, by the note or tone of its utterance. 

And this may happen in two ways, either grammatically 
or rhetorically. The grammatical emphasis rests upon such 

1 Not yet Bishop of Manchester when these pages were written. 



526 OF PROSODY. 

points as the following. There are certain words which are 
naturally unaccented, and in a general way it may be said 
that the symbolic words are so. It is the province of 
grammar to teach us what words are symbolic and what 
presentive. Grammar teaches, for instance, when the word 
one is a numeral, and when it is an indefinite pronoun. In 
the former case it is uttered with as full a note as any other 
monosyllable ; but in the latter case it is toneless and enclitic. 
It can hardly be a good line wherein this word, standing as 
an indefinite pronoun, receives the ictus of the metre, as in 
the following : — 

• Where one might fancy that the angels rest.' 

He would be an ingenious man who should devise a 
sentence in which this word ought to bear the accent. 
A wTiter in the Christian Remembrancer for January, 1866, 
undertook to shew that almost any word may be so placed 
as to be the bearer of emphasis. In proof of this he devised 
an hexameter in which a and the are emphasized : 

' A man might have come in, but the man certainly never,' 

Thus a rhetorical emphasis can be contrived for most 
words. You can emphasize any word to which you can 
oppose a true antithesis. To the word one you can oppose 
in some instances the word two, or any other number. And 
thus one may be emphasized, as — 

' I asked for one, you gave me two.' 

In other cases the word none would be a natural antithesis 
to one. But when we use the word one in the sense of the 
French pronoun 'on,' it is incapable of antithesis, and 
therefore it cannot carry emphasis. These being gram- 
matical distinctions, we call the emphasis which is based 
upon them the grammatical emphasis. 

To give another example. It belongs to grammar to 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 527 

direct the attention towards the antecedent referred to by 
any pronoun; and according as that antecedent is under- 
stood the pronoun will or will not carry emphasis. 

In Psalm vii. 14, the word kim admits of two render- 
ings according to the antecedent which it is supposed to 
represent, 

'13 If a man will not turn, he will whet his sword : he hath bent his 
bow and made it ready. 

14 He hath prepared for him the instruments of death : he ordaineth 
his arrows against the persecutors.' 

We sometimes hear it read as if it were a reflexive pro- 
noun, such as would be represented in Latin by sz'dz] in 
which case it is toneless. But if the reference be, as it is 
generally understood, to ' the man who will not turn/ spoken 
of in the preceding verse, then the reader ought to express 
this by an emphatic utterance of the word h'm, such as shall 
make it apparent that it is equivalent to/br thai man. This 
is again an emphasis which is used to mark a grammatical 
distinction. But when words grammatically identical are 
exposed to variations of emphasis, this is due to the exigencies 
of the argument, and we call such emphasis rhetorical. 

This happens in the following passage with the pronoun 
some : — 

* Very likely : to some phenomena there is, as yet, no explanation. Per- 
haps Newton himself could not explain quite to his own satisfaction why he 
was haunted at midnight by the spectrum of a sun ; though I have no doubt 
that some later philosopher, whose ingenuity has been stimulated by New- 
ton's account, has by this time suggested a rational solution of that enigma.' 
— Lord Lytton. 

The natural tone of symbolic words is low ; / came^ 1 saw, 
I conquered. No one would emphasize the pronouns here. 
The same may be observed of the pronouns in the following 
quotation : — 

* I went by, and lo, he was gone ; I sought him, but his place could no 
where be found.' — Psalm xxxvii. 37. 



528 OF PROSODY. 

But words of this rank may receive the rhetorical em- 
phasis. The reply of Sir Robert Peel to Cobbett makes a 
good illustration : — 

' Why does the hon. Member attack mef I have done nothing to merit 
his assaults, / never lent him a thousand pounds.' 

Here the pronouns are emphasized, because there is an 
allusion to Mr. Burdett, who had lent Cobbett a thousand 
pounds, and had been rewarded with scurrility. At the 
close of the Night Thoughts we have this line, — 

' The course of nature is the art of God.* 

Here it will be perceived that the symbol-verb comes in for some 
emphasis, receiving as it does the ictus of the metre ; though 
this little word is naturally toneless. The emphasis which it 
here carries awakens the remembrance of the fact that there 
are philosophers in the world who would question the state- 
ment. W-e may show ourselves that this is the case by play- 
ing a variety or two upon the phrase. If we say thus, * the 
course of nature is changeful,' the symbol- verb does its duty 
in the most unobtrusive manner. If now we contrive to 
force the is into prominence, we shall convert a proposition 
which, as it stands, is a very inoffensive truism, into a ludi- 
crous dictum emphasizing a statement which nobody denies. 
And this may be done by expressing that truism in the 
form of a heroic line, with the stroke of the metre upon 
the symbol verb. 

' The course of nature is a course of change.' 

The elevation given to the word is produces the effect of 
leaving one to expect a pointed assertion in the predicate, 
and the disappointment of this expectation produces the 
palpable bathos. 

Emphasis, then, is a distinct thing from accent. The latter 
is an elevation of a syllable above the rest of the word ; the 



i 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 529 

former is the elevation of a word over the rest of a phrase. 
But it should be noticed that, while there is this difference of 
relation between emphasis and accent, there is, on the other 
hand, an identity of incidence. The emphasis rests on the 
selfsame point as does the accent. We say indeed that the 
emphasis is on such and such a word, because by it one 
word is distinguished above all other words in the phrase. 
But the precise place of the emphasis is there where the 
accent is, in all words that have an accent; that is to say, in 
all words that have more than one syllable. In the case of 
a polysyllable, which has more than one accented syllable, 
the emphasis falls on the syllable that has the higher tone. 
An accented word is emphasized by the intensification of its 
chief accent. 

In Acts xvii. 28, ' for we are also his offspring,' there is no 
doubt that the emphatic word is ' offspring.' The Greek 
tells us so explicitly, by prefixing to this word a particle, 
which is in our version ill rendered by * also.' A reader 
who enters into the spirit of the reasoning in this place, will 
very markedly distinguish the word ' offspring.' And he will 
do so by sharpening the acuteness of that accent which 
already raises the first syllable above the second. 

There is a well-known line in the opening of the Satires 
of Juvenal, which the greatest of translators has thus rendered, 
and thus emphasized by capitals : — 

' Hear, always hear ; nor once the debt repay ? * 

In this instance of a disyllabic emphasized, the rhetorical 
emphasis rests on that syllable which had the accent, while 
the word was in its private capacity. In fact, emphasis is 
a sort of public accent, which is incident to a word in regard 
of its external and social relations. 

Where a polysyllable, like elementary, has two accents, the 



S3^ OF PROSODY. 

emphasis heightens the tone of that which is already the 
higher. In a sentence like this, — 'I was not speaking of 
grammar schools, but of elementary schools,' the rhetorical 
emphasis falling on ekmen/arj, will heighten the tone of the 
third syllable. 

In all this there is no change of quantity, no lengthening 
of the syllable so affected by accent and emphasis together. 
It is true, we often hear such a syllable very sensibly length- 
ened, as thus : * I beg leave once more to repeat, that I was 
speaking only of ele-ma-entary schools.' The syllable is 
isolated and elongated very markedly, but then this is some- 
thing more than emphasis, it is stress. 

In living languages, accent and emphasis are unwritten. 
The so-called French accents have nothing whatever to do 
with the accentuation of the language, but belong solely to 
its etymology and orthography. In Greek, as transmitted to 
us, the accents are written, but they were an invention of 
the grammarians of Alexandria. In the Hebrew Bible, not 
only are the accents written, but likewise the emphasis; 
these signs are, however, no part of the original text, but a 
scholastic notation of later times. 

Written accents are very useful as historical guides to a 
pronunciation that might be lost without them. But for the 
present and living exercise of a living language they are 
undesirable. All writing tends to become traditional, and 
characters once established are apt to survive their significa- 
tion. Had our language been accentuated in the early 
printed books, we should have had in them a treasure of 
information indeed, but it would have been misleading in 
modern times, and probably it would have cramped the 
natural development of the language. For example, we 
now say wMtso and whoso, but in early times it was whatso 
and whoso. This change is in natural and harmonious keep- 



1 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 53 1 

ing with the changes that have taken place in the relative 
values and functions of the words entering into these com- 
pounds, as already explained above, p. 404. Here, there- 
fore, we see the accent still true to its office as an interpreter 
and illustrator. An instance of the old emphasis on so 
occurs in The Faerie Queene, iii. 2. 7 : — 

' By sea, by land, where so they may be matt.' 

But, while we make no attempt to write accent, we may 
be said to attempt some partial and indirect tokens of em- 
phasis by means of our system of punctuation. It is, how- 
ever, in our old Saxon literature that we find emphasis in the 
most remarkable manner signalised. The alliteration of the 
Saxon poetry not only gratified the ear with a resonance 
like that of modern rhyme, but it ^Iso had the rhetorical 
advantage of touching the emphatic words ; falling as it did 
on the natural summits of the construction, and tinging them 
with the brilliance of a musical reverberation. 

The most convenient illustration we can offer of the Saxon 
alliteration will perhaps be obtained by selecting from the 
Song of the Fight of Maiden, such staves as have retained 
their alliteration in Mr. Freeman's version, in Old English 
History for Children :— 

' Eac him wolde Eadric * Eke to him would Eadric 

his ealdre gelsestan. his Elder serve. 

lucon lagu-streamas ; Locked them the lake-streams ; 

to lang hit him ])uhte. too long it them thought. 

wigan wigheardne, A warman hard in war ; 

se waes haten Wulfstan. he hight Wulfstan. 

Wodon ]ja wael-wulfas, Waded then the slaughter-wolves, 

for waetere ne murnon. ' for water they mourned not, 

bogan waeron bysige, Bows were busy, 

bord ord onfeng. boards the point received. 



532 OF PROSODY. 

he sceaf ]>a mid >am scylde, He shoved then with his shield, 
)>aet se sceaft to baerst. that the shaft burst. 

Wiga wintrum geong, Warrior of winters young, 

wordum maelde. with words spake. 

hale to hame, Hale to home, 

o'SSe on here cringan. or in the host cringe. 

mod sceal ])e mare, Mood shall the more be, 

])e ure maegen lytlaS.' as our main lessens.* 

Had we continued to be isolated from the Romanesque 
influence, like the people of Iceland, we might have de- 
veloped this form of poetry into something of the luxuriance 
and precision which it has in Icelandic literature, as may be 
seen in the Preface to Mr. Magnusson's Lilja, 1870. 

Since we have adopted the French principles of poetry, 
alliteration has retired into the background. As late as the 
fourteenth century we find it pretty equally matched as a 
rival with the iambic couplet in rhyme; but within that 
century the victory of the latter was assured. By Shaks- 
peare's time alliteration was spoken of contemptuously, 
as if it had reached the stage of senility. The pedantic 
Holofernes says he will 'affect the letter,' that is to say, 
compose verses with alliteration. 

' Hoi. I will something affect the letter, for it argues facilitie. 

The prayfull Princesse pearst and prickt a prettie pleasing Pricket, 
Some say a Sore, but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.' 

Loves Labours Lost, iv. 2. 

But however much it had come to be despised, it has not- 
withstanding managed to retain a certain position in our 
poetry. ' Alliteration's artful aid ' is still found to be a real 
auxiliary to the poet, which, sparingly and unobtrusively 
used, has often an artistic effect, though its agency may be 
unnoticed. Shakspeare himself provides us with some very 
pretty instances of alliteration. 



SOUND AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. 533 

' If what in rest you haue, in right you hold.' 

King John, iv. 2. 55. 

' Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth.' 

King Richard II. ii, i. 52. 

• And sigh'd my English breath in forraine Clouds, 
Eating the bitter bread of banishment ; 

While you haue fed upon my Seignories, 

Dis-park'd my Parkes, and fell'd my Forrest Woods.' 

Id. iii. I. 20. 

One of the boldest poets in its use is Spenser, as — 

'Much daunted with that dint her sense was daz'd.' 
*Add faith unto your force, and be not faint.' 

• His gall did grate for griefe and high disdaine.' 

' Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad.' 

The Faerie Queene, i. i, 18, 19, 29. 

In Blew Cap for Me, a ballad of the time of James I, is this 
good alliterative line : — 

' A haughty high German of Hamborough towne.' 

In Paradise Regained we have the following : — 

' Yet held it more humane, more heavenly, first 
By winning words to conquer willing hearts.' i. 221, 

*A table richly spread in regal mode.' ii. 339. 

'Weepe no more, wofuU shepherds, weepe no more.' 

Lycidas. 

' The French came foremost, battailous and bold.' 

Fairfax, Tasso, i. 37. 

' Talk with such toss and saunter with such swing.' 

Crabbe, Parish Register, Part II. 

' The ploughman homeward plods his weary way.' 

Gray, Elegy. 



534 



OF PROSODY, 



A very good example, and one which, from the coin- 
cidence of the emphasis with the alliteration, recalls the 
ancient models, is this from Cowper's Garden : — 

' He settles next upon the sloping mount, 
Whose sharp declivity shoots off" secure 
From the dash'd pane the deluge as it falls.' 

The Christian Year affords some very graceful examples. 
On Palm Sunday we read : — 

'Ye whose hearts are beating high 
With the pulse of Poesy. 

By whose strength ye sweep the string. 

That thine angels' harps may ne'er 
Fail to find fit echoing here.' 

The ancient taste for alliteration has produced some per- 
manent effects on the stock phraseology of the language. 
It is doubtless the old poetic sound that has guaranteed 
against the ravages of time such conventional couplings as 
these : — 

Cark and care. 

Rhyme and reason. 

Weal and woe. 

Wise and wary, (Cf. Chaucer, ProZo^z/e, 1. 312.) 

Wit and wisdom. 

And to the same cause I would attribute the preservation of 
the old word sooth in the phrase sooth to say. Except in the 
zQim^^ovccidi forsooth^ the word sooth is otherwise quite unused. 
A little attention would soon discover a great many other 
instances, showing how dear to humanity is the very jingle 
of his speech, and how he loves, even in his riper age, to keep 
up a sort of phantom of that harmony which in his infancy 
blended sound and sense in one indistinguishable chime. 



SOU^'D AS AN ILLUSTRATIVE AGENCY. ^^^ 

The various kinds of by-play in poetry, such as alliteration, 
rhyme, and assonance, seem all to harmonise with the ac- 
centuation. While alliteration belongs naturally to a lan- 
guage which tends to throw its accent as far back as possible 
towards the beginning of the word, rhyme and assonance 
suit those which lean rather towards a terminal accentuation. 
Hence alliteration is the domestic artifice of the Gothic 
poetry, as rhyme and assonance are of the Romanesque. 
Rhyme has indeed won its way, not only in England, but 
in nearly all the other seats of Gothic dialects; still it is 
in the Romance literatures that we must observe it, if we 
would see it in the full swing, which is possible only in its 
native element. 

Let us conclude this section with an observation of a more 
comprehensive kind than any which has yet been made in 
regard to the illustrative energies of sound. 

A rich and various modulation is the correlative of a 
richly variable collocation in matter of syntax. One illus- 
tration of this may be gathered from the fact that all lan- 
guages use greater freedom of collocation in poetry than in 
prose ; that is to say, in the more highly modulated literature 
the freedom of displacement is greater. Anything like the 
following would be simply impossible in English prose : — 

' Who meanes no guile be guiled soonest shall.' 

The Faerie Queene, iii. I. 54. 

Another manifest illustration of the same lies in the fact 
that it is in the most musical languages we meet with the 
extremest liberty of collocation. How strangely variable was 
the collocation of the classical languages, is pretty well 
known to all of us, whose education consisted largely in 
'construing Greek and Latin,' that is to say, in bringing 
together from the most distant parts of the sentence the 



53^ OF PROSODY. 

words that belonged to one another functionally. If we 
have in English less of such violent and apparently arbitrary 
displacements, it should be remembered that we also have 
less of musical animation to render justice withal to the 
signification of such displacements. And further, if the 
modern languages generally have less variation of arrange- 
ment than the ancient classics had, it is supposed that 
even the most musical of the modern languages are less 
musical than were the Greek and Latin. But in this 
sovereign quality of music, a language is not doomed 
to be stationary. There is such a thing as progress in 
this no less than in syntax. And as an argument that 
musical progress has been made in EngUsh, we have only to 
reflect how modern is the public sense of modulation, and 
the general demand that is made for 'good reading.' All 
things are double over against one another ; and the demand 
for well-modulated reading is one indication that the power 
and range of modulation is progressing. And with this 
modulatory progress there is certainly a collocatory progress 
afoot. The proofs are not perhaps very conspicuous, but 
mey are visible to those who look for them, demonstrating 
that a greater elasticity and freedom of displacement (so to 
speak) are being acquired by the English language. 



11. Of Sound as a Formative Agency. 

We now proceed to consider sound as a power which 
affects the forms of words. The attention must be directed 
to the accentuation and its consequences. 

I. The simplest instance is where the accent has a con- 
servative effect upon the accented syllable, while the unac- 
cented syllable gradually shrinks or decays. Thus, in the word 



SOUND AS A FORMATIVE AGENCY. 537 

goodwife the accented syllable was preserved in its entirety, 
while the second syllable shrank up into such littleness as 
we are familiar with in the form goody. This is a plain 
example of a transformation conditioned by the incidence 
of sound. 

In American literature the word grandsire has assumed 
the form of grandsir from the same cause. The accented 
syllable remains complete, while the unaccented dwindles. 
The following quotation will be sufficient to establish the 
fact : — 

' Viewing their townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous 
doctorate with which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew 
him most famiharly as Grandsir DoUiver. ... All the younger portion 
of the inhabitants unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to 
Grandsir DoUiver's infirm and reverend presence.' — Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

The way in which the accent has wrought in determining 
the transformation of words from Latin into French, has 
been briefly and eff"ectively shewn by M. Auguste Brachet, 
in his Historical Grammar of the French Tongue. The 
unaccented parts have often lost their distinct syllabi- 
fication, while the syllable accented in Latin has almost 
become the whole word in French. Thus — 

Latin. French. 



angelus 




ange 


computum 




compte 


debitum 




dette 


decima 




dime 


porticus 




porche 




Mr. 


Kitchin's Translation, p. 33 sqq. 



This is but a small part of the case as there expounded, 
and the student should by all means go to the book itself, 
and master this portion, for this is the marrow of philology. 

A good example is afforded by the modern Greek nega- 
tive. The negative in modern Greek is 5eV, and this is an 



53^ OF PROSODY. 

abbreviation from the classical Greek ovdcv. A person who 
looked at ovdev might be inclined to say that the essential 
power of that negative is stored up in the first syllable, while 
the second is a mere ^expletive or appendage. From this 
point of view it would be inconceivable how the first part 
should perish and the second remain. But if we consider 
that the first is the elder part, and that the second was added 
for the sake of emphasis, it is plain that the second part 
would carry the accent, as indeed the traditional notation 
represents it. 

This eff'ect of the accent must be particularly attended to, 
as presenting, perhaps, the best of all keys for explaining 
the transformations which take place in language. Were 
we to disregard the influence of the laws of sound, and 
imagine that sense was the only thing to be taken into con- 
sideration, we should often be at a loss to understand why 
the most sense-bearing syllables have decayed, while the 
less significant ones have retained their integrity. The 
national and characteristic Scottish word u7tco is an instance. 
It is composed of un and coufh, the ancient participle of the 
^•erb ciinnan, '■ to know.' So that uncouth meant * unknown,' 
' unheard-of,' and consequently ' strange.' In England the 
word has retained its original form, because the accent is on 
the second syllable; but in Scotland, the accent having 
been placed on the first, and the word having been much 
used in such a manner as to intensify the accent by em- 
phasis, the second syllable has shrunk up to the condition 
which is so familiar to the admirers of Scottish literature. 

2. So far we have been considering the formative effect of 
accent in its simplest instances, — those namely where the 
accented syllable retains its integrity, while the unaccented 
seems to wither, as it wxre, by neglect. But we must now 
proceed to a somewhat more complicated phenomenon. 



SOUND AS A FORMATIVE AGENCY. 539 

The accent does not always prove so conservative in its 
operation. It is like wind to fire ; a moderate current of air 
will keep the fire steadily burning, but if the air be applied 
in excess, it will destroy the flame which before it preserved. 
So with the accent; if it be highly intensified it will not 
conserve, but rather work an alteration in the syllable to 
which it is applied. 

A familiar instance of the eff"ect of an accent in altering 
the form of a syllable may be seen in the word woman. 
This word is compounded of wife and man, and the change 
which has taken place in the first syllable exhibits the altering 
effect of an intense accent. 

The same thing may be observed in the word gospel. 
This word is composed of good and spel ; but the first syl- 
lable has been reduced to its present proportion by 'cor- 
reption,' if we may revive the very happy Latin term by 
which a shortened syllable was said to be seized or snatched. 
When we seek the cause why accent should have operated 
in manners so opposite, we shall probably find that the 
diversity of result is due to a difference of situation in the 
usual employment of a given word. A word, for instance, 
whose lot it was to be often emphasized would naturally be 
the more liable to correption of its accented syllable. 

3. As we have seen that each of the syllables of a di- 
syllabic word may be in different manners affected by the 
accent, so we may next observe that both of these changes 
may sometimes be found in one and the same word. 

The word housewife is often pronounced huz'if and this 
pronunciation is the traditional one. The full pronunciation 
of all the letters in housewife is not produced by the natural 
action of the mother tongue, but by literary education. 
Regarding huz'if then, as the natural and spontaneous 
utterance of housewife^ we see that both syllables have 



540 OF PROSODY. 

suffered alteration. The condition of the second syllable 
is accounted for by the absence of the accent; while the 
first syllable has suffered from an opposite cause. There 
it has been the intensification of the accent that has occa- 
sioned the change. And when, through the beat of metre, 
the accent becomes emphasis, we sometimes find the first 
syllable spelt with correption. 

In Milton's Co?nus, 1. 751, this occurs: — 

' Beauty is Nature's brag, and must be shown 
In Courts, at Feasts, and high Solemnities, 
Where most may wonder at the workmanship ; 
It is for homely features to keep home, 
They had their name thence ; coarse complexions 
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply 
The sampler, and to teize the huswives wooll.' 

(Ed. Tonson, 1 7 25.) 

The name of Shakspeare, it is well known, appears with 
many variations of orthography. The most curious perhaps 
of all its forms is that of Shaxper \ which exhibits both of 
the phenomena that we are now considering. In Shaxper 
we see that each of the two syllables is shrunken, but from 
opposite causes. The first syllable is compressed by the, 
intensifying power of the accent, while the second syllable 
is impaired by reason of the languor of an enclitic position. 

These changes, which thus result from accentuation, are 
sometimes seen to carry with them interesting phonetic ac- 
companiments. Standish is the name of a place in Glouces- 
tershire, but it is better known as a man's name in the poetry 
of Longfellow. This word is an altered form of Stonehouse, 
or rather of that word in its ancient shape of Stanhus. Here 
the accented syllable has drawn a d on to it, and the languid 
syllable an h. The former is but an instance of a well- 

^ This form is found with the date of 1579. Shakespeareana Genealogica, 
compiled by George Russell French. 1869. 



SOUND AS A FORMATIVE AGENCY. 54I 

known phonetic affinity which in various languages has so 
often produced the combination nd. But that the kzis should 
have lapsed into zsk is something more particularly English, 
and belongs to the same class of tendencies by which that 
sound has often risen among us both out of Saxon and out 
of French materials. 

A great number of transformations which are a stock 
item of astonishment with us, are only to be accounted for 
by the consideration of accentual conditions. Such are 
Ciceter for Cirencester; Yenion for Erdington; Ransom for 
Rampisham (Dorset) ; Posset for Portishead, &c. So Clat- 
fordtun has become Claverton ; Cunacaleah is Conkweil, 
&c. The scene of the following quotation is laid in the 
time of Queen Anne : — 

Candish, Chumley. 

' Why should we say goold and write gold, and call china chayny, and 
Cavendish Candish, and Cholmondeley Chumley ? ' — W. M. Thackeray, 
Esmond, Bk. III. ch. iii. 

Here may be noticed such a familiar formula as Good dye, 
which has come out of ' God be with ye.' 

But there are effects traceable to accent, which are of 
a more deep-seated and comprehensive character. It is to 
accent that we must attribute the rise of flexion, in the great 
bulk of the phenomena included under that name. Flexion 
is the result of the adhesion of low-toned words to those 
which are higher toned, to words rendered eminent and 
attractive by a superiority of accent. Thus, if the word ibo 
resolves itself into three words answering to the three letters 
of which the word is now composed, and if these three 
words stood once free of each other in this order — go will i, 
it was because of the accentual pre-eminence of go that the 
other two words first of all began to lean enclitically on it, 
and at length were absorbed into unity with it. 



542 OF PROSODY. 

And as the action of sound is a matter of great conse- 
quence in the shaping of words, so also we may detect a 
like power working to effect transpositions in phraseology. 
Why do people often say ' bred and born ' instead of ' born 
and bred/ except that they like the sound of it better? 
There is in most newspapers a quarter which is thus headed : 
— Births, Marriages, and Deaths. But in conversation it 
is hardly ever quoted in this form. The estabHshed col- 
loquial form of the phrase is this : — Births, Deaths and 
Marriages. Now it is plain that the latter does violence 
to the natural order of things, to which the printed formula 
adheres. Whence then has this inconsequence arisen? 
Solely, as it seems, from the fact that the less reasonable 
order offers the more agreeable cadence to the ear. 



III. Of Sound as an Instinctive Object of 
Attraction. 

Our path leads us more and more away from the con- 
scious action of man in the development of speech, to mark 
how the sentient and instinctive tendencies of his nature 
claim their part in the great result. There is observable 
a certain drawing towards a fitness of sound ; that is to say, 
the speaker of every stage and grade strives after such an 
expression as shall erect his language into a sort of music 
to his own ear. And this is reached when harmony is 
established between the meaning and the sound; that is 
to say, when the sound strikes the ear as a becoming repre- 
sentative of the thought. It is a first necessity in language, 
that it should gratify the ear of the speaker. 

As the savage and the civilised man have different stand- 
ards of music, so have they different standards of what is 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 543 

harmonious in their speech. The civilised nations are con- 
verging towards an agreement on both these heads ; but 
they will sooner be at one on the matter of music than they 
will on the modulation of speech. In the very elements 
of the melody of language, namely the tones which are 
proper to the several vowels, there is an hereditary differ- 
ence which, though of the most delicate and subtle kind, 
yet produces by combination great divergences in the 
modulation of speech. Each separate nation has in fact 
a vowel-gamut of its own. 

The following paragraph, which is borrowed from the 
Academy (December, 1870), gives the results of some minute 
investigations which have recently been made in the gamut 
of the North German dialect : — 

' The Nature of Vowel-Sounds. — A discovery announced in the Comptes 
rendiis for the 25th of last April, by Rudolf Koenig, the well-known maker 
of acoustical apparatus, seems likely to have an important bearing on some 
points of philology. It is known that Helmholtz has shown that the dis- 
tinctive character of the vowel-sounds is due to fixed tones characteristic of 
each, and that he has investigated the pitch of the tones proper to the dif- 
ferent vowels, by examining the resonance of the cavity of the mouth, when 
adjusted for whispering them, by means of vibrating tuning-forks held near 
the opening of the lips. In this way he arrived at the following results : — 

Vowel U O A E I 

Characteristic tone . . / h''^\) 6»b &'"!? d\^ 

' Koenig, on repeating Helmholtz's experiments with more complete ap- 
paratus, has entirely confirmed his general result, but has arrived at slightly 
different conclusions as to the characteristic tones of the vowels U and I, 
which he finds are respectively lower and higher octaves of the tones of the 
intermediate vowels. For the North German pronunciation (to which 
Helmholtz's results also refer) the vowels are accordingly characterised as 
follows : — 

Vowel U O A E I 

Characteristic tone . . b\) h^\) 6"b ^'"b ^^^lJ 

Simple vibrations per) ^ o /: ^ h,^«« 

sLnd {approximate)]'^^'' 9°° ^S°° 3^00 7200 

As Koenig points out, it is more than probable that the physiological reason 
of the occurrence of nearly the same five vowels in different languages, is to 



544 OF PROSODY. 

be sought for in the simplicity of these ratios, just as the simplicity of the 
ratios of the musical intervals explains the adoption of the same intervals by 
most nations.' 

In consonants there is a great difference as regards 
national standards of taste. The Gothic ear enjoys a pre- 
cipitous consonantism, while the Roman family prefers a 
smooth and gentle one. And as a natural consequence of 
this difference, we, when we were most Gothic, could endure 
an abruptness of consonants which now that we have been 
Frenchified in our tastes, is displeasing to our national ear. 

Thus, we now count it vulgar to say ax, and yet this 
sound was quite acceptable to the most cultivated Saxon. 
We have transposed the consonants, and instead of ks we 
say sk ; instead of ax we say ask ; and we prefer tusks to 
the Saxon tuxas. In like manner, we now say grass, cress, 
where the elder forms were gcers, ccErs. Reversely, however, 
we say bird, third, cart, in preference to the elder forms 
brid, thridde^ crcEt. There is observable at different eras in 
the language of a nation a certain revolution of taste in 
regard to sounds; and this exhibits itself in modifications 
of the vowel-system, and in conversions or transposi- 
tions of old established consonantisms. It is not possible 
(apparently) to reduce such cases to any other principle than 
this, that it has pleased the national ear it should be so. 

This national taste is inherited so early, and rooted so 
deep in the individual, that it becomes part of his nature, and 
forms the starting-point of all his judgments as to what is 
fitting or unfitting in the harmony of sound with sense. The 
association between his words and his thoughts is so intimate, 
that to his ear the words seem to give out a sound like the 
sound produced by the thing signified; nay, further, that 
his words seem like the thing signified even where it is an 
abstract idea or some other creation of the mind. So that it 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 545 

becomes a difficult matter to say how far certain words are 
really like certain natural sounds, for instance ; or whether 
it is only an inveterate mental association which makes us 
think so. That is the first difficulty about the onomatopoetic 
theory of the origin of language. That theory appeals to a 
sense which we have of likeness between many of our words 
and the natural sounds of the things signified. Sir John 
Lubbock, in his recent work On the Origin of Civilisaiion Sec, 
has given lists of words of which, in his opinion, there can 
be no doubt that the origin is onomatopoetic. That is to 
say, they were coined at a blow in imitation of audible 
sounds. Now the fact is, that many of them are resoluble in 
earlier forms, which had meanings distinct from the present 
meanings; and the onomatopoetic appearances are the 
results of that instinctive attention to fitness of sound, which 
is one of the habitual accompaniments of linguistic develop- 
ment. An example will make it clearer : Sir John Lubbock 
says, — 

' From pr, or prut, indicating contempt or self-conceit, comes proud, 
pride, &c. 

From fie, we have fiend, foe, feud, foul, Latin putris, Fr. puer, filth, 
fulsome, fear. In addition I will only remark that. 

From that of smacking the lips we get yXvKvs, dulcis, lick, like.' p. 282. 

We shall all as Enghshmen be ready to acknowledge that 
proud and pn'de do sound like the things signified. But how 
are we to reconcile the supposed onomatopoetic origin of 
these words with the fact that they have an earlier history, 
which may be seen inDiez, Lexicon Linguarum Romanarum, 
and which leads us far enough out of the track of the idea 
here assigned to pr. They are traced either to Old French 
prude, moral, decorous; or to the Latin prudens, providus, 
prudent, provident. 

It is not too much to say that all of these examples rest 
upon the ground of a superficial appearance, and that their 



54^ OF PROSODY. 

onomatopoetic origin will not bear inspection. Let us 
proceed to the last of the series. The work like is here 
derived from the sound of smacking the lips. It is in fact the 
old Saxon word for 'body/ lie, which in German is to this 
day Seicfc, pronounced almost exactly as our like. Great as 
the distance may seem between body and the liking of taste, 
it is measured at two strides. There is but one middle 
term between these wide extremes. From substance to 
similitude the transition is frequent and familiar ; and so lie, 
'body/ easily produced the adjective like. That likeness breeds 
likiiig is proverbial. This fact has been used by Dr. Trench, 
Parables, p. 24, to explain the natural delight of the 
human mind in the method of teaching by similitude or 
parable ; where also is added the following note, so germane 
to our present study : — 

' This delight has indeed impressed itself upon our language. To like a 
thing is to compare it with some other thing which we have already before 
our natural or our mind's eye ; and the pleasurable emotion always arising 
from this process of comparison has caused us to use the word in a far wider 
sense than that which belonged to it at the first. That we lilie what is Wke 
is the explanation of the pleasure which rhyme gives us.' 

If the reader desires to enquire further into the onomato- 
poetic theory, he will find all that can be said in its favour in 
the philological writings of Mr. Wedgwood ; and there is a 
judicial examination of onomatopoeia by Professor Max 
Miilier in the ninth lecture of his First Series. 

Our present interest in this theory is rather incidental. It 
bears by its very existence a valuable testimony to that prin- 
ciple which we are just now concerned to elucidate. It 
proves that several men of the best and most highly ex- 
ercised faculties do perceive throughout language such a 
harmony of the sound of words with their sense, that they 
not only would rest satisfied with an account of the origin 
of language which referred all to external sound, but that it 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 547 

appears to them the only rational explanation. Those who 
reject the onomatopoetic theory need not discredit the phe- 
nomenon on which it relies. They may admit that there is, 
running through a great part of human speech, a remarkable 
chime of sound with sense, and yet doubt whether language 
was founded upon an imitation of external sounds. The 
phenomenon itself may not have been primitive and original, 
but rather the ripe fruit of late efforts of the genius of speech. 
At every stage in the development of every word, there are 
a great number of possible variations or alternative modes of 
utterance; and before a word settles down into an estab- 
lished position, it must have been (unconsciously) recog- 
nised as the best for that particular purpose of all those that 
were in the field of choice ; and among the qualifications and 
conditions of the competition, the satisfaction of the ear has 
never been absent, though it may have been little noticed. 

When we speak of the satisfaction of the ear, we of course 
mean a mental gratification ; namely, that which arises from 
a sense of harmony between voice and meaning. There is 
a pleasure in this, and as there is a pleasure in it, so there is 
naturally a preference for it, and, other things being equal, 
the utterance which gives this pleasure will survive one 
that gives it not. One of the words which has been thought 
to favour the onomatopoetic origin is squirrel. If this word 
had been destitute of a pedigree, and had been dashed off at 
a moment of happy invention, then its evidence might have 
been invoked in that direction. But when we perceive that it 
has a long Greek derivation, and that the idea upon which 
the word was moulded was that of umbrella-tail, we can 
only marvel at the sonorous fitness of the word to express 
the manners of the funny little creature, after all traces of the 
signification of the word had been forgotten ; and we must 
allow that somewhere in the speech-making genius there 
N n 2 



54^ OF PROSODY. 

must be a faculty which concerns itself to seek the means of 
harmony between sound and sense. 

It would indeed be too much to say that the basis of this 
harmony is not in any absolute relations between things and 
ideas on the one hand, and sounds on the other. But this 
may be said : that while such absolute relations have been 
often maintained by a certain show of reason, there has not 
as yet been any proof such as science can take cognisance 
of. It seems rather as if each race had its own fundamental 
notions of harmony, and that from these the consonance of 
words had taken shape as from some elementary postulates. 
Well as squirrel seems to us to harmonise with its object, 
there is no reason to doubt that in the judgment of a Red 
Indian it would appear very inappropriate, and that he 
would consider Adjidaumo as much more to the point. 

' Boys shall call you Adjidaumo, 
Tail in air the boys shall call you.' 

Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha. 

Taking it then as certain, that there is in speech a striving 
after this expressiveness of sound, we must next observe the 
varying ways it has of displaying itself, in the successive stages 
of the development of human speech. It does not always 
occupy the same ground. The English language has passed 
that stage in which words are palpably modified to meet the 
requirements of the ear. And accordingly, those who make 
lists of words in support of the onomatopoetic theory, will 
be found to lean greatly to old-fashioned and homely and 
colloquial words, in short, to such words as figure but little 
in the forefront of modern English literature. They are the 
offspring of a period when the chime of the word was more 
aimed at than it now is. And we may in some ancient 
literatures find this so-called onomatopoeia in greater vigour 
than in English. 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 549 

Most abounding in examples of this kind is the Hebrew 
language, where we have a glorious literature that was 
formed under the conditions now spoken of; that is to say, 
while the language was still sensitive to the grouping of 
consonants in the chime of its words. The details cannot 
here be produced, but the student may find his way to them 
in the Heh-ew Grammar of Heinrich Ewald, as for instance, 
sections 58, 59, sqq., on the meeting of consonants, 3ufam= 
mentrefen s?on 3i)titlauten. But without minute details, an 
illustration or two may be given. 

It is no mere illusion which causes even a slightly imbued 
Hebrew scholar to feel that in the kindly, soothing, 'noc- 
turne ' sound of Mlah, the Hebrew word for night, there is a 
suggestion of that thought which some have supposed to be 
etymologically expressed by the Greek evcppovrj, the thought 
which is thus rendered in familiar lines from the Hebrew 
fountain : — 

' And from the due returns of night 
Divine instruction springs,' 

The Hebrew word for 'righteousness,' zedakah, has a 
melody which chimes admirably with the idea. Whatever 
beauty of thought is embodied in the Themis and Dike and 
Astraea of the Greek personifications, may all be heard in 
the sound of the Hebrew zedakah. Nor is this mere fancy. 
That the word spoke not to the mind alone through the 
ear as a mere channel, but that the sound of the word 
had a musical eloquence for the musical ear of the He- 
brew, we have such evidence as the case admits of. We 
find it set against the cry of the oppressed zeghdkah, where 
the dental has been exchanged for the most rigid of gut- 
turals, represented here by gh. In fact, there is a stage in 
language, when the musical appropriateness of the word is 
the chief care. This is the age of the Hebrew antitheses 



K^^O OF PROSODY. 

and parallelisms. In the passage alluded to, not only is 
there the contrast already described, but also that of mishpat, 
'judgment,' with viishpach, 'oppression,' and here also the 
gende sound of the dental is changed to the grating sound 
of a guttural, though milder than in the other instance. 

'He looked for judgment {mishpat), but behold oppression (mishpach) ; 
tor righteousness (zeddkah), but behold a cry (zeghdkah).^ — Isaiah v. 7. 

This class of cases has been sometimes inconsiderately 
treated as if they approached in some sort to the nature of 
the paronomasia or pun. But no two things could be more 
distinct. The pun rests on a duplicity of sense under unity 
of sound, and it is essentially of a laughter - provoking 
nature, because it is a wanton rebellion against the first 
motive of speech, whereby diversity of sense induces diversity 
of sound, that the sound may be an echo to the sense. 

A few years ago, in the time of spring, two men were 
riding together across the fields, and observing how back- 
ward the season was. Neither of them had seen the may- 
blossom yet. Presently, one dashed ahead towards some- 
thing white in a distant hedge, but soon turned round again, 
exclaiming to his companion : ' No, it is not the may, it is 
only the common sloe.' Whereupon the ready answer came : 
' Then the may is uncommon slow ! ' That is a pun, where 
the unity . of sound between widely different words is sud- 
denly and surprisingly fitted into the sense of the con- 
versation. 

Different, but akin, is the Double-meaning, where the two 
senses of an identical word are played upon. Mr. Wadge, 
in his speech of thanks on the occasion of a presentation 
banquet in his honour, at the Albion, June i, 1866, was 
dilating on the interest he had taken from earliest youth in 
the study of mineral deposits ; how he found matter even in 
his school-books to feed this enthusiasm; how he devoured 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION 55 1 

Lucretius De Rerum Natura, but especially the passage 
about the discovery of metals. This being delivered with 
some intenseness, was pleasantly relieved by the ensuing 
remark, that only in one thing did the speaker differ from 
the poet. Lucretius deplored that whereas in the good old 
time, brass was highly valued and gold disregarded, now that 
was changed, — gold had dethroned brass, and the harder 
metal was of no account by the side of the softer. 

' I have nothing to say against gold, which certainly now, as when the 
poet wrote, is m summum hotioretn ; but I must say something for brass. 
(Laughter.) Whatever may have been the case when Lucretius wrote, it 
cannot now be truly said nunc jacet aes ; for in my experience brass is, 
next to gold, the greatest power that influences the world.' (Great cheers 
and laughter.) 

Such are the double-meaning and the pun. But these 
things are very wide of the feature now under consideration. 
These are laughable from their eccentricity. They are funny 
because they traverse the law of the language in a playful 
manner. As an expression of wit they are perfectly legiti- 
mate only so long as the rhetoric of the language turns on 
word-sound. In English, they are now half-recognised, 
because the language has passed beyond that stage of 
which they were a wanton inversion. Hence we may ob- 
serve that the mind of the scholar, that is to say, the mind 
which is imbued with the elder conditions of language, is 
ever prone to punning. 

In contradistinction to all this, the Hebrew antitheses arise 
out of the legitimate exercise of the rhetorical properties of 
the language; and their very consonance with the present 
condition of the language is an element of their solemnity. 

In every successive stage of language there is a music 
proper to that stage ; and if we seek the focus of that music, 
we must watch the action of the language in its exalted 
moods. When we see that the poetry and the oratory of a 



^^Q, OF PROSODY. 

language avails itself largely of the contrast of word-sounds, 
we cannot doubt that the national ear is most alive to that 
particular form of speech-music which gives prominence to 
individual words. This is the case of the Hebrew paral- 
lelisms; and it is the key also to alliteration in poetry, 
where the echo of word to word is the sonorous organ of 
the poet. But a period comes in the course of the higher 
development of language, when the sonorousness of words 
gives place to the sentiment of modulation, whereby a 
musical unity is given to the sentence like the unity of 
thought. It is to this that the foremost languages of the 
world, and the English language for one, have now at- 
tained. If we look at Saxon literature, we see two widely 
different eras of language Uving on side by side, the elder 
one in the poetry, and the later one in the prose. The 
alliterative poetry belongs to an age in which the word-sound 
was the prominent feature; the prose is already far gone 
into that stage in which the sound of the word has fallen 
back and become secondary to the rhythm of the sentence. 
The development of rhythm had already become so full and 
ample by the time of the Conquest, that the restraint of 
iambic metre was needful, and it was readily accepted at the 
hands of our French instructors. Rhyme also was adopted, 
not indeed for the first time, for occasional examples occur 
before; but the general use of rhyme came in with the 
iambic metre under French influence. Rhyme is an attend- 
ant upon metre, but it acts in concert with rhythm neces- 
sarily ; and for the most part it corresponds to the divisions 
of syntax, though this is unessential. Rhyme is a very 
insignificant thing philologically, as compared with allitera- 
tion: for whereas this is, as we have before shown, an 
accentual reverberation, and rests upon the most vital part 
of words; rhyme is but a syllabic resonance, and rests 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 553 

most frequently upon those syllables which are vocally of 
the lowest consideration. It is, however, one among the 
many little tributaries towards the evidence of a fondness in 
man for a sonorous accompaniment to his language. 

Rhyme is a feature attached to metre ; its office is to mark 
the ' verse ' or /urn of the metre, where it begins again. The 
relation of verse to syntax is undetermined. The line may 
end with a grammatical pause, or it may end in the middle 
of a phrase where the most lavish punctuationist could not 
bestow a comma. But it must never mar the rhythm : with 
or without rhyme, the turn of a verse must never occur but 
at a rhythmical subdivision, and these are finer and more 
frequent than grammatical subdivisions. 

' So thy dark arches, London Bridge, bestride 
Indignant Thames, and part his angry tide.' 

The poetry of the Anti-Jacobin is a good repertory for 
varieties of verse-making, because it contains lawless as well 
as lawful examples. In the above couplet, the reader will 
perceive that though there is not a grammatical division be- 
tween the Hues, there is a rhythmical one, and that there is 
a real gain to the effect by the voice being made to rest 
a perceptible time on bestride : the modulation so obtained 
is a help to the picture on the imagination. 

One of the commonest means for producing the effect of 
drollery in verse, is by offending against this rule, and break- 
ing the verse in spite of rhythm. 

'Weary Knife-grinder! little think the proud ones. 
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike- 
road, what hard work 'tis crying all day " Knives and 
Scissors to grind O ! " ' 

Metre and rhythm must be wedded together, in order to 
produce the true harmony of poetry. A limping line is the 
result of discord between these two. Not long ago a manu- 



554 OF PROSODY. 

script of Samson Agonistes was sold at Messrs Sotheby's 
auction-rooms in which the prosaic lines — 

' For God haih wrought things as incredible 
For his people of old ; what hinders now ? ' 

were rendered so majestic as to be worthy of the poet by the 
following simple transposition : — 

• For God of old hath for his people wrought 
Things as incredible ; what hinders now ? ' 

The same alteration has rectified at once both the metre and 
the rhythm, but the gain in metre is a small thing compared 
to the gain in having those two lines restored to rhythm. 
The metre of the passage is that which has been used by all 
our poets in their chief works, from Chaucer to Tennyson. 
But the rhythm of those two lines, as of all lines which we 
recognize as Miltonic, is the author's own. The identity of 
the metre does not hinder varieties in the character of poetry, 
any more than the identity of the letters of the alphabet 
excludes varieties in the forms of words. Shakspeare, whose 
verse has a sound so peculiar to itself, employs the most 
ordinary metre. 

Dryden's grand feats of musical language are sometimes, it 
is true, combined with extraordinary metres, as in Alex- 
ander's Feast. But these are not necessary to him, as witness 
the following lines from the opening of his JEneid : — 

' From hence the line of Alban fathers come, 
And the long glories of majestic Rome ' 

The blank verse of Thomson is framed on the same 
metre with that of Milton. Metre is to rhythm what logic 
is to rhetoric ; what the bone frame of an animal is to its 
living form and movements. As the bony structure of a 
beautiful animal is amply enveloped ; as the logic of a good 
discourse is there, but undisplayed, — so is the metre of good 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. ^^^ 

poetry lost to the view, while the ear is entirely occupied 
with its rhythm. And as men use rhetoric before logic, so, 
likewise, did they use rhythm before metre. Metre may be 
artificially transplanted from one nation to another, as the 
French m.etre was transplanted to our language. But 
rhythm is more deeply rooted in the race and nation, and 
the individual writer can only within a limited range play 
variations upon the natural rhythm of his mother tongue. 
In common parlance we give a writer the credit of his 
rhythm, as we do to Milton. But the elemental stuff out of 
which it is made, is rather an inheritance than a personal 
product. Every man inherits a certain national intonation. 
This is that which is most ineradicable of all things which go 
to constitute language. This is that which we call the 
brogue of the Irishman, the accent of the Scotchman, or of 
the Welshman. By great care and early training it may be 
disciplined out of an individual, but we have no experience 
of its wearing out of a population. The people of Devon, 
who hardly retain two Welsh words in their speech, have an 
intonation so peculiar, that it can only be interpreted as a 
relic of the otherwise extinct West- Welsh language. 

Any one with an ear for the melody of language, and with 
a heart accessible to romantic feelings, cannot but be drawn 
towards the Irish people, if it were only for the singular and 
mysterious air which constitutes the melody of their speech. 
What though they speak Saxon now instead of Erse, the 
rhythm is unshaken. It runs up into, and is indistinguish- 
able from, that native music which is the surest exponent of 
national character and its most tenacious product, over- 
living the extinction of all other heirlooms, as it is touch- 
ingly and tunefully said in fitting cadences by Thomas 
D'Arcy Mc Gee in the following Ode : — 



OF PROSODY. 



'TO OSSIAN. 



' Long, long ago, beyond the misty space 

Of twice a thousand years, 
In Erin old, there dwelt a mighty race, 

Taller than Roman spears ; 
Like oaks and towers, they had a giant grace, 

Were fleet as deers : 
With winds and waves they made their 'biding-place, 

These Western shepherd-seers. 

Great were their deeds, their passions, and their sports : 

With clay and stone 
They piled on strath and shore those mystic forts 

Not yet o'erthrown ; 
On cairn-crown'd hills they held their council-courts ; 

While youths alone, 
With giant-dogs, explored the elk resorts. 

And brought them down. 

Of these was Finn, the father of the bard 

Whose ancient song 
Over the clamour of all change is heard, 

Sweet-voiced and strong. 
Finn once o'ertook Granu, the golden-hair'd, 

The fleet and young ; 
From her the lovely, and from him the fear'd, 

The primal poet sprang. 

Ossian ! two thousand years of mist and change 

Surround thy name — 
Thy Fenian heroes now no longer range 

The hills of fame. 
The very names of Finn and Gaul sound strange, 

Yet thine the same, — 
By miscall'd lake and desecrated grange — 

Remains, and shall remain ! 

The Druid's altar and the Druid's creed 

We scarce can trace ; 
There is not left an undisputed deed 

Of all your race. 
Save your majestic song, which hath their speed, 

And strength and grace; 
In that sole song they live, and love, and bleed, — 

It bears them on through space. 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION 557 

Oh, inspired giant ! shall we e'er behold 

In our own time 
One fit to speak your spirit on the wold 

Or seize your rhyme ? 
One pupil of the past, as mighty-soul'd 

As in the prime 
Were the fond, 'and fair, and beautiful, and bold, — 

They, of your song sublime ! ' 

The distinctiveness of all that which we call brogue, 
accent, &c., is ultimately resoluble into a speciality of modu- 
lation or rhythm. Here is the stronghold of Nature and 
the seat of national and provincial peculiarity. The fact 
that the English language has not retained the music of the 
Saxon, is the greatest of all evidences how profound a change 
was accomplished by the great French interval of the transi- 
tion. Had the new language started with a provincial basis, 
instead of springing up as it did in the Court, the result 
might have been different. As it was, we got a new music, 
based on a new key-note, and one quite distinct from any of 
its constituent elements. 

But while we acknowledge in rhythm something pro- 
founder than metre, we must not deny to the latter a certain 
magisterial and interpretative function, which it obtains by 
its position and office. As the man of formulas often directs, 
and sometimes practically determines the action of his 
superior, so metre exercises a sort of judicature even over 
rhythm. 

Metre acts as a sort of stiffener to the rhythm. It 
has on the one hand a suppressive, and on the other 
a sustaining agency. It helps to sustain elevation, while it 
controls the natural swell of enthusiastic rhythm. This con- 
straint exercised by metre over the rhythmical movement is 
least felt in blank verse, because terminal rhymes are like 
so many studs or clasps, which pin down the metre from 
point to point, and greatly add to its stringency. » 



^^S OF PROSODY. 

Rhyme has developed its luxuriance in its native regions, 
that is to say, in the Romanesque dialects. The rhyming 
faculty was not born with our speech, and it is still but im- 
perfectly naturaUsed among us. The English language is 
found to be poor in rhymes when it is put to the proof, as 
in the essay of translating Dante in his own /erza rima. 

Of all the forms which the Romanesque metres have 
assumed in the English language, the blank verse is that 
which we have most completely nationalised and made 
our own. And the probable explanation of this is, that 
Rhyme is too confining for our native rhythm, when it would 
put forth its full strength. On the other hand. Metre, 
though it restrains, does unquestionably help to sustain the 
elevation, by the way in which it brings out the subordinate 
pauses and finer articulations in the rhythm. I would ask 
the reader to consider the following lines, lending his ear 
especially to the verse-endings which close without punc- 
tuation : — 

* A gracious spirit o'er this earth presides, 
And o'er the heart of man : invisibly 
It comes, to works of unreproved delight, 
And tendency benign, directing those 
Who care not, know not, think not what they do. 
The tales that charm away the wakeful night 
In Araby, romances ; legends penned 
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps ; 
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised 
By youthful squires ; adventures endless, spun 
By the dismantled warrior in old age. 
Out of the bowels of those very schemes 
In which his youth did first extravagate ; 
These spread like day, and something in the shape 
Of these will live till man shall be no more. 
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours, 
And they must have their food. Our childhood sits. 
Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne 
That hath more power than all the elements.' 

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. V. 

All true poetry feels after, and grows towards, a sweet low 



J 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 559 

musical accompaniment, which sounds to the ear of the mind 
h'ke the thing described, even though it should be the process 
of nature, which marches in silence. The following lines, 
from an unknown poet who signs G. M., display this har- 
mony of the rhythm with the description : — 

' On that opposing hill, as on the stage 
Of rural theatre, or Virgil's page, 
I watch the shifting scenes of country life, — 
Man's patient labour and his world-old strife. 
First, the stout team drags on the biting plough; 
Thro' the hard clods it cuts and pierces slow ; 
The careful yeoman guides the furrow'd way, 
The rook succeeds, and lives another day. 
Then come the sowers, who with careless skill 
Scatter the grain and every fissure fill ; 
Then the light harrow the smooth soil restores, 
And soon the field feels life in all her pores. 
Next some bright morning, as I mark the scene, 
My fancy soothes me with a shade of green, 
Which after every shower more vivid grows. 
Till em'rald brightly o'er the surface glows, 
Then yellow clothes the scene, and soon, too soon, 
Red ears bow heavy to the harvest moon.' 

In making a poetical translation, the first thing is to 
get hold of a melody. The metre, and even in some mea- 
sure the grammar, must be secondary ; else there can be no 
rhythm, and therefore no unity. Your verses may parse, 
and they may scan, and be but doggerel after all. The 
master-principle then is rhythm. In the following lines from 
Mr. Griffith's translation of the Rdmdyana, we have not only 
words and phrases and metre, but we have also a rhythm, 
which gives the whole a unity and an individuality, making 
it ' like something ' ; and we, who do not read Sanskrit, can 
enquire whether that is a faithful rendering of the effect of 
the original : — 

' Balmy cool the air was breathing, welcome clouds were floating by, 
Humming bees with joyful music swelled the glad wild peacock's cry. 
Their wing-feathers wet with bathing, birds slow flying to the trees 
Rested in the topmost branches waving to the western breeze.' 



560 OF PROSODY. 

But no English reader, with a cultivated ear, would be 
likely to ask whether the following bore any resemblance to 
Horace, simply because, through lack of rhythm, it has no 
unity, and it leaves on the mind no impression of having 
any likeness or similitude of its own : — 

' Methinks Dame Nature to discriminate 

What *s just from what 's unjust entirely fails ; 

Though doubtless fairly she can separate 

What 's good from what is bad, and aye prevails 

What to avoid, what to desire, to state ; 
And Reason cannot prove that in the scales 

The man who broke another's cabbage-leaf 

Should weigh as guilty as the sacrilegious thief.' 

It would lead us too far if we attempted to exemplify in 
detail the conclusion at which these latter pages are pointed. 
It is this : — Our language has passed on beyond the stage 
at which the chime of words is a care to the national ear, 
and it has adopted instead thereof the pleasure of a musical 
rhythm, which pervades the sentence and binds it into one. 
Ewald has happily described the perception of rhythm as 
®inn fiirS ® anjc — a feeling or sentiment for the Whole. When 
the English language is now used so as to display a sonorous 
aptness in the words, we call it Word-painting. 



We will conclude this final chapter by a few illustrations 
to the same effect drawn from the inceptive stages of speech. 
The first dawn of intelligence, the first smile of the infant 
on the mother, is in response to the tones of her maternal 
encouragements : 

* Incipe parve puer risu cognoscere matrem.' 

Vergil, Eclogue iv. 60. 

' Smile then, dear child, and make thy mother glad.' 

Translation by H. D. Skrine, 1868. 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION, 56 1 

Before speech is attained by the infant, he gets a set of 
notes or tones to express pleasure or offence, assent or 
refusal. The first attempts to speak are mere chirruppings 
and warblings ; that is to say, it is the music of what is said 
that is caught at first, while the child has as yet no ears for 
the harder sense. By a beautiful and true touch of nature, 
and all the more noticeable because it is not a common- 
place of poetry, a poet of our own day has coupled the 
early speech of children with the singing of birds : 

•I love the song of birds, 
And the children's early words.' 

Charles Mackay, A Plain Man's Philosophy. 

John Keble has justified the teaching of divine truths to 
children, on the ground that, if the sense is beyond them, 
there is a certain musical path of communication : 

' Oh ! say not, dream not, heavenly notes 
To childish ears are vain. 
That the young mind at random floats, 
And cannot reach the strain: 

Dim or unheard the words may fall, 

And yet the heaven-taught mind 
May learn the sacred air, and all 

The harmony unwind.' 

The general effect of such observations is towards this : — 
That the sentient and emotional parts of human nature have 
a greater share in the origins of language than the intel- 
lectual faculty. The first awakener of language is love. 

I knew a litde orator who, at the age of five years, would 
make speeches of irresistible force, though he was more 
than usually backward in grammatical sequence. It being 
one morning said in his presence that he had been found 
half out of bed, and the cause surmised that his brother 
elbowed him out, he exclaimed, ' Yes, he elbowed me 
o o 



562 OF PROSODY. 

harder and harder — could be!' In modulation this was 
a perfect utterance : the voice had risen very gradually and 
plaintively so far as * harder and harder ' — then a pause, 
as he was feeling after a climax — and then out broke 
in an octave higher the decisive words ' could be ! ' 

It was the same boy who once said it was not his bed 
time ' this 'reckly,' a compromise between ' this tninute ' and 
•' directly/ but which, in the way it was delivered, very far 
surpassed either of these forms of expression. 

The fact is that children have a greater appreciation 
of sound than of sense, and that accordingly their early 
words are in good melody and bad grammar. Their 
judgment of the fitness of words for the office they fill, 
will often be very distinctly pronounced. And this judg- 
ment rests, as indeed it can rest, on nothing else than 
the chime of the sound with their notion of the thing 
indicated. The judgment of children is often found so firm 
and distinct on this matter, that we must conclude a great 
part of the early exercise of their wakening minds has been 
concerned with the discrimination of sounds. A little watch- 
ing might supply many illustrations on this head ; what is 
here produced is not the result of any careful selection, but 
just what offered itself about the time that this chapter was 
in preparation. 

A father who took an interest in some pigeons that were 
kept for the amusement of his children, had the whim to 
call them all by some fanciful name ; and as they multiplied 
it became harder to invent acceptable names. So it hap- 
pened that, after many familiar names, there came in some 
from classical sources. Of these it was observed (months 
after) that one had fixed itself in the memory of the 
children. They were playing with the kitten, and their 
inward glee was venting itself in the name of Andromache, 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. ^6^ 

which they used as a term of endearment. Some days later, 
when they were again at play, and shouting Andromache, 
their father asked them, ' Which is Andromache ? ' The 
younger answered with an exuberance of satisfaction : 
* Johnnie 's calling me Andromache ! ' Their father replied, 
' If Johnnie calls you Andromache, Td call him Polyhymnia ! ' 
At this, Johnnie (a boy of six years old) towered up like 
a pillar of moral indignation, and in a tone of mingled 
disdain and deprecation, said : ' Augh ! Nobody couldn't 
be called that, I'm sure ! ' 

A boy of five years old was asked, ' Do you know where 
your cousin Johnnie is at school ? ' ' No ! I don't know ; 
where is he ? ' ' At Honiton.' ' At Hon-t-iton ? Isn't that 
a funny place ; / call it ? ' 

Here it will be observed the place is judged of by the 
sound of its name ; there is no distinction between the name 
and the thing. 

In the minds of children and savages the word and the 
thing are absolutely identified. If they are able to grasp 
the name, they seem to have a satisfaction analogous to that 
which the mature mind tastes in the fullest description or 
analysis. 

I was staying in the house of a friend, where the youngest 
child was a brave, bold, golden-locked boy, under three years 
old. As I was dressing in the morning he came into my 
room, and we had a long and varied conversation. One 
of the topics was broached and disposed of somewhat in 
the following manner : — ' Are Mabel and Trixey coming 
to-day ? ' he asked. ' I'm sure I don't know. Who are 
Mabel and Trixey ? ' Thereat he took up a strong and 
confident attitude, and with a tone which at once justified 
himself and refuted me, he said : ' They are Mabel and 
Trixey ; that's their names ! ' — the last clause a perfect bar 

2 



564 OF PROSODY. 

of remonstrative music ; as much as to say, * You surely are 
satisfied with /haf !' 

This is very delightful in a child, as all truly childish 
things are. But in more advanced stages of human Hfe, 
when childishness is formulated into a sort of wisdom of the 
ancients, then it gradually assumes a less agreeable aspect. 
We no longer admire this identification of the word with 
the thing, when an eastern doctor or charmer writes a good 
word on a slip of paper and makes of it a pill for his patient. 
Here the childish conception of speech has stagnated into 
a fetichism which is at the root of incantations and verbal 
charms. 

The following most significant record of native talk in the 
Aru Islands is from The Malay Archipelago, by Alfred 
Russell Wallace (1869): 

* Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth 
time to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pro- 
nounce it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that 
it was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a 
ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. 
" Unglung ! " said he, " who ever heard of such a name ? — anglang — anger- 
lang — that can't be the name of your country; you are playing with us." 
Then he tried to give a convincing illustration. " My country is Wanumbai 
— anybody can say Wanumbai. I'm an orang-Wanumbai ; but, N-glung ! 
who ever heard of such a name ? Do tell us the real name of your country, 
and then when you are gone we shall know how to talk about you." To 
this luminous argument and remonstrance I could oppose nothing but asser- 
tion, and the whole party remained firmly convinced that I was for some 
reason or other deceiving them.' — ch. xxxi. 

This is a very significant narrative, and I have authority 
from Mr. Wallace to add that it is a literal and faithful 
record. He says it ' was written down on the spot the day 
after it occurred, and is strictly accurate as far as I could 
reproduce the words and tone of it in English ^' 

^ Communicated to me through the Rev. George Buckle, to whom also 
I owe many other acknowledgments. 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. ^6^ 

The notion that by the possession of the name of the 
country they would have the wherewithal to talk of their 
visitor after his departure, is an excellent illustration of the 
germination of the Myth as expounded by Professor Max 
Miiller in the Oxford Essays of 1856. 

All these are instances of the inability of man, in the ear- 
lier stages of his career, to assume the mastery over language. 
His mind is enthralled by it, and is led away after all its 
suggestions. 

We are told by Professor Jowett that the Greek philoso- 
pher, ' the contemporary of Plato and Socrates, was incapable 
of resisting the power of any analogy which occurred to him 
.... and he was helpless against the influence of any word 
which had an equivocal or double sense \' 

It may be imagined that we, in our advanced condition 
of modern civilisation, are now completely masters over 
language, but an investigation of the subject might pro- 
duce an unexpected verdict. Philology is one of the 
most instrumental of studies for investing man with the 
full prerogative over his speech, for its highest office is 
to enable him to comprehend the relation of his words 
to the action of his mind, and thus to render the mind 
superior to verbal illusions. 



Those who think that the sounds of nature first sug- 
gested language to man, hold a theory of language which 
may be compared to that theory of music by which music 
is derived from the cataract in the mountains, the wind in 
the trees, or the sound of the ocean on the shore. It appears 
to me that there is nothing in inward or outward experience 

^ The Dialogues of Plato, vol. ii. p, 505, 



566 OF PROSODY. 

to justify such a theory. Music and language ahke must 
have come from within, from the greatest depths of our 
nature. 

Man's conscious work upon language in fitting it to 
express his mind, is the least part of the matter. The 
greater part is worked out unconsciously. And long eras 
pass after the perfecting of its processes, before intellectual 
man awakes to perceive what he himself has done. This 
only proves from what a depth within his own nature this 
power of speech is evolved ; only proves what a mystery 
man is to himself: and it casts a doubt over the prospect 
of our ever tracing a scientific path up to those springs 
which fancy calls the Origin of Language. 

For me, the poet speaks most appropriately on this theme, 
because he speaks most vaguely, most wonderingly and 
most inquiringly : — 

' Ye wandering Utterances, has earth no scheme. 
No scale of moral music, to unite 
Powers that survive but in the faintest dream 
Of memory? — O that ye might stoop to bear 
Chains, such precious chains of sight 
As laboured minstrelsies through ages wear ! 
O for a balance fit the truth to tell 
Of the Unsubstantial, pondered well ! * 

To make a path from the visible, ponderable, and sub- 
stantial, to that which is invisible, imponderable, and spiritual, 
with no other material than vocal sound to erect a bridge 
from matter to mind, — tempering it in the finest filtered 
harmonies that can be appreciated by the sentient, emo- 
tional, and intellectual nature of man ; — this seems to be the 
task and function of human speech. 

Of its origin W3 can only say, it is of the same root with 
that poetic faculty whereby man makes nature echo his 
sentiments; it is correlated to the invention of music, whereby 



SOUND AS AN OBJECT OF ATTRACTION. 567 

dead things are made to discourse of human emotions ; it is 
a peculiar property of that nature whose other chief and 
.proper attributes are the power of Love, and the capacity 
for the knowledge of God. 



IN DEX. 



[The ordinary Roman type is used to indicate English forms that have 
been illustrated or exemplified : the Italic type indicates those of the 
Transition stage of the language : forms of high antiquity are put in 
SMALL CAPITALS : the TMck type indicates Subjects that have been treated 
or touched upon, over and above those which are already indicated by the 
general plan of the work.] 



A, the article, 416. 

— the character, 196. 

— the vowel, 105, 107. 
aback, 509. 

abacus, 302. 
abaft, 509. 
abandoning, 482. 
abed, 376, 509. 
abet, 81. 

abidden, 229, 232. 
abide, 229. 
Abingdon, 481. 
-able, 336. 
aboard, 509, 
abode, 229. 
about, 38, 129, 435. 
abstraction, 195. 
abut, 84. 
academic, 352. 
Accent, 537, 
accept, 79, 337. 
acceptable, 336, 337, 

338. 
acceptance, 337. 
accepted, 337. 
accessible, 336. 
accidental, 339. 
accord, 79. 
according, 454. 
account, 36, 337. 
accountable, 336, 337. 
accountant, 337. 
accounted, 337. 
ace, 56. 
aches, 149. 
acknowledge, 114. 
acoustic, 352. 



acquamt, 79. 
acquaintance, 296. 
acquaintanceship, 275. 
acquittal, 300. 
active, 348. 
acupement, 2 3o. 
-acy, 296, 
-ad, 303. 
add, 79. 
-ade, 303. 
adieus, 180. 
ado, 381. 
adubbement, 280. 
advance, 79. 
advancement, 280. 
adventure, 79. 
adventuresome, 331. 
adverse, 79. 
advertize, 258, 294. 
advice, 262. 
advise, 262. 
advowson, 279. 
Alfred, 272. 
^theling, 268. 
iEthelred, 272. 
sesthetick, 114, 352. 
afaitment, 280. 
afar, 376, 509. 
affair, 38 1, 
affluence, 296. 
afield, 376, 509. 
afloat, 509. 
afoot, 376. 
a-forlorn, 480. 
African, 352. 
after, 435. 
after all, 431. 



after a sort, 431, 

aftermath, 267. 

againe (Spenser), 138. 

against, 38, 441. 

-age, 283. 

-ager, 285. 

Agglutinating lan- 
guages, 473. 

aggregative, 348, 349. 

agoe, 129. 

agog, 376. 

aground, 509. 

AHAM, Sanscrit pronoun 
ego, 391. 

ahead, 509. 

aid and abet, 81. 

air-balloon, 505. 

ajar, 509. 

akin, 509. 

-al, 299, 338. 

alack, 166. 

alas, 165. 

a-laughter, 480. 

alchemy, 304. 

alcohol, 304. 

alcove, 304. 

alder, 21, ill. 

alc'er-bush, 505, 

Aldhelm, Bishop of 
Sherborne, 28. 

Aleph, 196. 

Alfred, King, 29. 

algebra, 304. 

algorism, 304. 

algorithm, 304 

all, 107, 138, 409. 

alley, ill. 



570 



INDEX. 



all hail, 173. 

Alliteration, 531. 

Allophylian lan- 
guages, 473. 

allow, 254. 

allowed, 254. 

all-poweiful, 510. 

allude-to-an-individual 
style, 501. 

almanac, 304. 

aloft, 50Q. 

along. 509. 

along of. 442. 

along on, 442. 

alongside, 509. 

aloof, 509. 

aloud, 376, 509. 

alow, 509. 

Alpha, 196. 

also, 434, 446. 

alsoe, 129, 134. 

ALWALDA, 27. 

alway, always, 136. 
am, 242. 
amain, 479, 480. 
amen, 174. 
amendement, 280. 
amiable, 79, 338. 
amid, 38. 
ammiral, 304. 
amo?iesiement, 2 So. 
American nsage, 
133, 186, 239, 311, 

524.- 
among, 441. 

an, numeral and article, 

33, 38, 416, 427. 
an, ? form of ' and,' 

453- 
-an (adj.), 326, 352. 
-an (inf.), 481. 
analytic, 352. 
anathematize, 258. 
anatomize, 258. 
-ance, 296. 
ancient, 185. 
-ancy, 296. 
and, 129, 434, 445, 

454.457.458- 
angehc, 330. 



Angle, 25. 

Anglian dialect, 48, 

53- 
Anglo - Saxon, the 

term, 17. 
animosity, 297. 
animus, 302. 
anodyne, 425. 
anonymous, 425. 
another, 415. 
-ant, 350. 
antagonistic, S53. 
antarctic, 353. 
antiquity, 297. 
any, 427. 
apathetic, 353. 
ape, 262. 
apologetic, 353. 
opos(le7ie, 67. 
apostolic, 339, 340. 
apparatus, 302. 
apparayl merit, 280. 
appeal, 310. 
apple, 2 I . 
appreciable, 336. 
appreciative, 348, 349. 
approachable, 336. 
approval, 300. 
aquatic, 339. 
Arabic, 340. 
arcana, 302, 303. 
archaeological, 341. 
archaic, 353. 
Arctic. 352. 
-ard, 289, 338. 
ardor, 299. 
ardour, 299, 
are, 149, 242. 
area, 302. 
arena, 302. 
aright, 376, 479, 480, 

509. 
arize (Spenser), 293. 
arm, 266. 
armlet, 283. 
arms of precision, 358. 
arnement, 280. 
aromatic, 353. 
around, 38. 
array, 79. 



arrow-wounded, 51 T, 
Article, in Danish 

and Swedish, 7. 
artistic, 339, 
-ary, 300, 350. 
Aryan languages, 

391. 473- 
AS, Sanscrit root, 219. 
as, 1 89, 409, 446, 447. 
as — as, as — so, 447. 
ascendant, 79. 
ascetick, 137. 
ash, 21, 266. 
ash-house. 520. 
ashore, 509. 
as it were, 479, 
-asm, 308. 
aspect, 133. 
aspen, 21. 
assay, 79. 
assent, 79. 
asseyment, 280. 
assize, 79. 

associative, 348, 349. 
-ast, 308. 
astern, 509. 
-astic, 353. 
astir, 509. 
asuinere, 221. 
asunder, 410. 
at, preposition, 37. 
at all, 431. 
at best, 375. 
at intervals, 375. 
at large, 375. 
at last, 375. 
at least, 375. 
at leastwise, 433. 
at length, 375. 
at most, 375. 
at no hand, 433. 
at once, 431. 
at present, 375. 
at random, 375. 
at worst, 375. 
ate, 107, 230, 
-ate, 258. 
atheism, 305. 
atheist, 307. 
athletic, 353. 



athwart, 509, 
-ation, 270, 298. 
atomic, 353. 
-atory, 350. 
attempted, 477. 
attercop, 311. 
audible, 336. 
auditor, 79. 
augrim, 304. 
August, 186. 
aiilnage, 285. 
aulneger, 285. 
aunt, 277. 
Austria, 278. 
authentic, 353. 
authoritative, 348, 
available, 336. 
avarice, 291. 
a vaunt, 79. 
away, 509. 
awe, 266. 
awfully, 370. 
awinter, 221. 
awl, 266. 
awork, 376. 
Axe, 20. 
Aytoun, 155. 
-aze, 308. 
azure, 79. 
azurn, 325. 

B, the character, 197. 

bace {for base), 138. 

back . . . home, 363. 

bacon, 44. 

bade, 229. 

badge, 266. 

Eaeda's account of 
the Saxon colo- 
nists, 17. 

Baeda quoted, 26. 

baggage, 283. 

baiie and borowe, 81, 

bairn, 90. 

bait, 85. 

bake,li, 128, 229, 237. 

bakehouse, 520. 

baken, 229. 

baker, 268, 287. 

balcony, 524. 



INDEX. 

ball, 108. 

banish, 77, 79. 

barbaresque, 341. 

barbaric, 353. 

barbarous, 346. 

bard, 22. 

Bardic, .^40. 

bare, 229, 322. 

bareheaded, 511. 

bargain, 277- 

barn-door, 194. 

barrier, 289. 

basis, 302. 

basket, 20. 

bastard, 289. 

bat, 107, 262. 

bate, 107. 

batelment, 280. 

bath, II. 

Bath, 20. 

battels, 85. 

Baxter, 320. 

be, verb, 4, 239, 240, 

24IJ 243, 478. 
BE (preposition), 38. 
be off, 439. 
beacon, 266. 
BEAH, 229. 

BEALH, 229. 

beam, 21, 266. • 

bean, 21, 

bear, 4, 229, 266. 

beard, 11. 

beast, 79. 

beat, 229. 

beaten, 229. 

beatify, 257. 

beating (Yarmouth), 

84. 
beautify, 257. 
beauty, 79. 
becalm, 39. 
because, 40, 446, 456. 
bechance, 257. 
beck, II. 

become, 257, 489, 509. 
BECUMAN, 39. 
bed, 266. 
bedabble, 39. 
bedaub, 39. 



57^ 

bedeck, 39. 
bedew, 39. 
BEDiciAN, 39. 
bed-ridden, 23. 
bedstead, 505. 
bee, 266. 
beech, 4, 21. 
beef, 44, 94. 
been, 229, 240. 
befall, 39, 257. 
befit, 39, 257. 
befool, 39. 

before, 39, 136, 187. 
befriend, 39, 257. 
began, 229, 251. 

BEGAN GAN, 39. 

beget, 39, 136, 257. 
begin, 39, 229, 257. 
begnaw, 257. 
begrime, 39, 257. 
begrudge, 39. 
beguile, 39, 257. 
begun, 229, 

BEGYRDAN, 39. 

behalf, 40. 
behave, 39, 257. 
behead, 136, 257. 

BEHEAFDIAN, 39. 
BEHEALDAN, 39. 

behest, 40. 
behide, 39. 
behind, 39. 
behold, 39, 257. 
behoof, 40. 

BEHORSIAN, 39. 

behove, 39, 257. 
behowl, 257. 

BEHREAWSIAN, 39. 

Being, idea of, 340. 
belabour, 39. 

BELANDIAN, 39. 

belate, 39. 
belay, 39. 
beldame, 276. 
beleaguer, 39. 
beleeue, 124. 

BELENDAN, 39. 
BELGAN, 229. 

belie, 39, 257. 
belieffulness, 270. 



57^ 

believe, 39, 155, 226, 

254. 257- 
believing in (inf.), 482. 
belike, 39, 445. 

BELISNIAN, 39. 

bellicose, 348. 
bell-v^rire, 505. 
belong, 39, 257, 509. 
belove, 39, 257. 
below, 39, 136. 
bemad, 257. 
bemete, 257. 
bemoan, 39, 257. 
bemock, 257. 
bemoil, 257. 
bench, 1 1, 
bend, 253, 254, 
beneath, 39. 
Benedicite ! 169. 
beneficence, 296. 
benevolence, 296. 
benevolent, 352. 
benign, 79. 
benignity, 297. 
BENIMAN, 39. 
benison, 279. 
bent, 253, 254. 

BEON, 229, 242. 

BeowTilf, the poem, 

27. 
bepaint, 257. 
bequeath, 3<>, 136, 257. 
bequest, 136. 
berattle, 257. 
Bercta, 112. 
Berctfrid, 112. 
Bertgils, 112. 
Bercthun, 112. 
Berctred, 112. 
Berctuald, 112. 
here, 21, 43, 108. 

BEREAFIAN, 39. 

bereave, 257. 
berhyme, 257. 

BESCIERAN, 39. 

beseech, 39, 257. 
beseek, 257. 
beseem, 39, 257. 
beset, 82, 257. 
beshrew, 39, 257. 



INDEX. 

besides, 40, 441. 
besiege, 79, 82, 257, 

BESITTAN, 39. 

beslubber, 257. 
besmear, 257. 
besmirch, 257. 
besort, 257. 
besot, 39, 257. 
bespatter, 39. 
bespeak, 39, 257. 
bespice, 257. 
besprinckled (Spenser), 

138. 
best, 364. 
bestain, 257. 
bested, 257. 
bestill, 257. 
bestir, 39, 257. 
bestow, 39, 257. 
bestraught, 257. 
bestrew, 257. 
bestride, 257. 

BESYREVi^IAN, 39. 

Beta, meaning of, 197- 
betake, 257. 
beteem, 257. 
beteli, 39. 
Beth, Hebrew letter, 

197 
bethiifk, 39, 136, 257. 
Bethlehemite, 302. 
bethump, 257. 
betide, 257. 
betoken, 257. 
betoss, 257. 
betrap, 39. 
betray, 39, 82, 257. 
betrim, 257. 
betroth, 257, 
between, 39, 
betwixt, 39. 

BETYNAN, 39. 

beuk (Scottish), 232. 
bewail, 257. 
beware, 136, 257. 
bewed, 39. 
beweep, 257. 
bewet, 257. 
bewitch, 257. 
bewray, 257. 



beyond, 39, 136, 358. 
Bible translations. 

II, 12, 27, 404. 
bid, 229. 
bidden, 229. 
bide, II. 
bier, 1 1, 266. 
bight, 267. 
bill, 312. 
Billingsgate, 49. 
billowy-bosomed, 511. 
bind, 229. 
birch, 21. 
bird, 544. 
bishop, 62. 
bishopric, 275. 
Bishopsgate, Without. 

Within, 358. 
bit, 85, 108, 229. 
bite, 85, 109, 229. 
bitten, 229. 
blackbird, 505, 522. 
Blackheathen, -ian, 

325- 

blacksmith, 135. 

blame, 79. 

blanc-mange, 79- 

blatant, 350. 

bled, 254. 

bleed, 254. 

blemish, 77. 

blessing, 267. 

blew, 229. 

blight, 267. 

blincked (Spenser), 138. 

bhss, 266. 

bloodshed, 135. 

bloodthirsty, 507. 

bloody, 327. 

bloom, 2r. 

blossom, 21. 

blow, 229. 

blown, 229. 

board, 43. 

boat, 22, 266. 

boatswain, 501, 505. 

bob, 266. 

Bob, 312. 

bodes ( = command- 
ments), 283. 



body, II, 330, 406. 
bog, 109. 
boil, 79. 
boisterous, 346. 
bold, II. 

BOLGEN, 229. 

bone, II, 128, 330. 
bonnie, 90, 94. 
bookbinder, 287. 
books, 317. 
boor, 43. 

boot (' to-boot '), 83. 
bore, 229. 
born, II, 229. 
borne, 229. 
borough, 266. 
borowe, 8r. 
borrow, 237. 
bosom, 266. 
bote (noun), 84. 
bote (verb), 229, 232. 
both, 128. 
bottle of hay, 85. 
bought, 247. 
bound, 229. 
bounden, 229. 
bountihed, 274. 
bourne, 86. 
Bournemouth, 87, 
bow, 229, 237, 332. 
bowln, 229, 232. 
bowne, 229, 232, 
boy, 276. 
boyhood, 274, 
' Boz,' 312, 
bracelet, 783. 
' Brad Scots' dia- 
lect, 28. 
braid, 87, 237. 
brain, 265. 
brake, 229. 
bramble, 21. 
bran, 20. 
branchlet, 283. 
brave, 32 j. 
brawn, 265. 
bread, 266. 

bread-and-cheese, 504, 
breadth, 267. 
break, 229. 



INDEX. 

breaking up, 417. 
breast, 266. 
breathe, 24 1, 
breeches, 20. 
bred, 254. 
breed, 254. 
breeks (Scotch), 318. 
brether, 317, 
brethren, 316, 317, 
Bretwalda, 27. 
brewhouse, 520. 
brick, 356. 
brick-wall, 357. 
bridal, 300. 
bride, 266. 

bridge by bridge, 376. 
bright, 1 12, 322. 
Brihthelm, 112. 
Brihtnoth, 112, 
Brihtric, 112. 
Brihtwold, 112. 
Brihtwulf, 112. 
brim, .-^24. 
brimstone (Spenser), 

136. 
brinded, 323. 
brindle, 323. 
brindled, 323. 
bring, 247. 
brisk, 362. 
Britanny, 278. 
Eritisb. words, 19 

foil. 
Brito - Eoman 

words, 19. 
brittle, 323. 
broaden, 257. 
broad-shouldered, 511. 
Brogue, 557. 
broided, 87. 
broider, 87. 
broidered, 87. 
broke, 229. 
broken, 229. 
brook (verb), 237. 
broomstick, 515. 
brother, 4, 267. 
brotherhood, 274. 
brought, 247. 
brutel ( = brittle), 323, 



Brutes, language of, 

213. 
bruze (Spenser), 293. 
bubble, 266. 
buck, 266. 
buds' nesens (Norfolk), 

317- 

build, 254. 

buildress, 320. 

building, 240. 

built, 254. 

bumptious, 347. 

burden, 266. 

burgage, 283. 

burgess, 295. 

Burgundy, 278. 

burial, 300. 

burly, 327. 

burn, 86, 237. 

burned, 78. 

burnish, 78, 

Burns, his lan- 
guage, 28,201,232. 

burst, 229. 

bursten, 229. 

'bus, 309. 

bush-bearded, 511. 

Bushy Park, 329. 

business, 85, 86. 

busy, 85. 

butcher, 94, 287. 

but, 186, 194, 434, 
436, 445, 457, 458. 

buttony, 328. 

buttress, 84. 

buxom, 34, 331, 

buy, 247. 

buzzard, 289. 

by, 4o> 435' 438. 

-by, 240. 

by'r leave, 1 70. 

C, the consonant, II r. 
cab, 309. 
cable, 182 

Caedmon, the poet, 
26. 

CiEG, 127. 

Cainites, 302. 
Caistor, 155. 



574 



INDEX. 



Caithness, 269. 

caitiff, 79, 328. 

calculate, 258. 

calf, 44, 266. 

call, 107, no. 

came, 229. 

can, 33, 36, 128, 249, 

251, 492. 
Canaanites, 302. 
cantelmele, 367. 
cap, 262. 
cape, 79. 
captainess, 320. 
capting, 48 1, 
captivate, 258. 
cards, 56. 
careless, 509. 
carf, 229, 232. 
cark and care, 534. 
carnal, 339. 
carpenter, 79, 81. 
carriage, 283, 284. 
carry, 79. 
cart, 544. 
cart-horse, 505. 
carve, 229. 
cast, 229. 
casten, 229, 233. 
castle, 42, 43. 
casualty, 297. 
cat, 107. 

catastrophism, 306. 
catch, 247. 
catechism, 305. 
cathartic, 353. 
catholic, 137. 
Catholicism, 305. 
cat-o'-nine-tails, 514. 
cattle, 79. 
cattle disease, 469. 
caught, 247. 
cause, 79. 
caustic, 353. 
cauterize, 258. 
cavalry, 277. 
Cavendish, 541. 
CAZiEi, 120. 

CEAFU, 127. 

CE ASTER, 127, 155. 

cedarn, 325. 



celestial, 79. 
celestiall, 138. 
cement, 280. 
CENE, 127. 
census, 302. 
CENT, 127. 

CEOL, 127. 
CEORL, 127. 
CEOSAN, 127. 
CEP AN, 127, 

certain, 79, 41 1. 

certainly, 297. 

certainty, 297. 

-ch, 326. 

chaff, 313. 

Chaldee, 2, 327. 

cham = 1 am, 221. 

champion, 79. 

chance, 57, 79 

chancellor, 42. 

change, 254. 

changed, 254. 

changez (French), 171. 

chaos, 302. 

chapman, 522. 

chapelry, 277. 

characteristic, 353. 

charioteer, 289. 

charitableness, 269. 

charlock, 273. 

charm, 79. 

chasm, 308. 

chastise, 293. 

chastisement, 2S0. 

Chaucer, 61, 68, 75, 
91, 122, 169, 200, 
221, 227, 243, 335. 

343' 367> 410, 446. 
cheap, 184, 190. 
cheat, 153. 
cheer, 79. 

cheesen (Dorset), 316. 
-Chester, 18. 
chew, 237. 
chicken, 267. 
chid, 229. 
chidden, 229. 
chide, 229. 
chiere and face, 81. . 
chiefety, 298. 



chiefly, 371. 
childer, 3 1 7. 
childhood, 274, 50S, 
children, 316. 
chill = I will, 221. 
chin, 266. 
China, 149. 
Chinese, 342. 
Chinese syntax, 191, 

472. 
chivalrous, 79, 
chivalry, 79. 
chode, 229, 232. 
Cholmondeley, 541. 
choose, 229. 
choosed, 255. 
chose, 229. 
chosen, 229. 
Christendom, 272. 
christian, 325. 
Christianity, 272. 
Christianity and 

languages, 11. 
christianize, 258. 
chud, = 1 would, 221. 
church, 127. 
church ale, 300. 
churchyard, 34. 
churl, 43, 56, 266, 
churlish, 327. 
Ciceter, 541. 
cmAN, 127. 

CILD, 127. 

Cingalese, 342. 
ciNNE, 127, 
cink, 56, 57. 
cipher, 304. 

CIRCE, 127, 

circuit, 79. 
circus, 302. 

city, 79. 
civility, 297. 
clad, 254. 
Clarendon's style, 

499. 
classification, 195. 
clave, 229. 
Claverton, 541. 
clean, 362. 
cleanliness, 271. 



515 



cleanly, 330. 
cleare (Spenser), 138. 
cleave, 232. 
clemency, 195, 297. 
clerk, 146. 
climacterick, 138. 
climb, 229, 237. 
cling, 229. 
clock, 22. 
clockwork, 505. 
clomb, 229. 
closure, 291. 
cloth, 266. 
clothe, 254. 
clout, 20. 
clove, cloven, 229. 
clover, 21. 
clung, 229. 
clupie = ciW, 61. 
CNAPA, 127. 

CNAWAN, 127. 
CNEDAN, 127. 
CNEOW, 127. 
CNIHT, 127. 

coal-layers, 503. 
coal-producing, 503. 
coal-scuttle, 505. 
coast-line, 502. 
coaxation, 299. 
cob, 311. 
cobweb, 311. 
cock-boat, 22. 
cockchafer, 267. 
cockle, 20. 
cod, 21, no. 
codify, 257. 
cognizance, 296. 
colourable, 337. 
comandement, 280. 
come, 229. 
comen, 229, 233. 
comer, 288. 
comestibles, 185. 
comfortable, 336. 
commauudement, 281. 
commendatory, 350, 
commeth, 124. 
commission, 79. 
compacement, 280, 282. 
companion, 67. 



company, 79. 
comparative, 348. 
comparison, 279. 
compass, 79. 
compassion, 79, 298. 
compendium, 302. 
competence, 296. 
complain, 79. 
complete, 136. 
complexion, 79. 
composedness, 269. 
con = to be able, 251. 
conceive, 155. 
concerns, 36. 
conclude, 79. 
conclusion, 79. 
conclusive, 348, 349. 
conculcation, 299. 
condiment, 281. 
confessional, 3^9. 
confidence, 296. 
conjurement, 280. 
Conkwell, 541. 
Conner, 267. 
conquest, 79. 
conscience, 79, 296. 
conscionable, 337. 
conseili, 61. 
consequence, 296. 
consider, 79. 
consols, 310. 
conspicuous, 347. 
conspiring, 483. 
constancy, 296. 
constant, 350, 
constitutionalize, 258, 
contemplate, 524. 
contemporary, 185, 

30i> 350. 
contemptible, 336. 
content, 79. 
contentedness, 269. 
contest, 133. 
continence, 296. 
contract, 20 1, 
contrariwise, 432, 509. 
contrary, 133, 134. 
contrition, 298. 
cook, 79. 
coost (Scotch), 232. 



cop, 311. 
cope, 79. 
coral-paven, 325. 
cordial, 79. 
CORFEN, 229. 
corn, 21, 266, 
Cornwall, 24. 
corny, 327, 328. 
coronation, 79, 298. 
corone77ient, 280. 
corpulent, 352. 
cosmos, 302. 
cottage, 283. 
cottage dames, 469. 
could, 141, 146, 249, 

251, 492. 
counsell, 138. 

count, 42. 

countenance, 79. 

countless, 42, 319. 

country, 79. 

coun ry-featured, 512. 

country-house, 514. 

Court English, 74, 
76, 89, 97. 

Court Hand, 69. 

courteous, 79, 346. 

covenant, 79. 

cover, 79. 

cover-chief, 79. 

covetise, 291. 

covetize (Spenser), 293. 

covetous, 346. 

covey tise, 291. 

cow, 44, 266. 

coward, 289. 

cowardice, 291. 

crack, 114. 

craft, 266. 

crag, 20. 

crap, 230, 233. 

creating (inf.), 483. 

creative, 348, 349. 

creature, 154. 

creep, 230, 237, 247. 

creeped, 255. 

crept, 247. 

crescive, 348. 

cress, 544. 

crest-fallen, 51 1. 



51^ 



INDEX. 



crew, 230. 
criminatory, 350. 
cristen = christian, 257, 

30^. 325- 

crock, 20. 

crope, 230, 233. 

cropen, 250, 233. 

cross-barred, 511. 

crotiny (infinitive), 61. 

crow, 230, 237. 

crowd, 36. 

cruel, 79. 

cruell, 138. 

cruppen, 233, 230. 

Cudberct, 112. 

Cudbriht, 112. 

cudto, cudtono (Lan- 
cashire), 221. 

ctiviherment, 280. 

cure, 79. 

curiosity, 297. 

ciirteisye, 82. 

custom, 79. 

cut, 110. 

cw^S, 115. 

cwALM, 115. 

CWEN, 115. 

cwic, 115. 
-cy, 271, 296. 
cyS, 127. 

CTLE, 127. 
CYN, 127. 
CYNERIC, 275. 
CITMAN, 127. 

D, the consonant, ill, 

197. 
-d, as form of past 

tense, 256. 
dafter, 126. 
dagger, 107. 
dainties, 79. 
dainty, 327. 
dale, 9. 
Daleth, Hebrew letter, 

197. 
dalfe, 230, 233. 
damn, 79. 
dance, 79. 
danger, 79, 285, 286. 



Danish, 326. 
Danish language, 8, 

205, 225, 381, 398, 

408, 495. 
Dantesque, 342. 
dare, 249. 
darkling, 330, 368. 
darknesses, 269. 
darksome, 331. 
darling, 330. 
dart, 262. 
Dartmouth, 147. 
dastard, 289. 
date, 107. 
daughter, 4, 9, 112, 

113, 126, 267. 
day, 9, III, 266. 
<layly, 365- 
deaf, 9. 

deal, 9, 247, 266, 408. 
dealer, 268, 
deanery, 277. 
dear, 322. 
death, 9, 154. 
debate, 79. 
deceive, 155. 
deceived, 123. 
decency, 271. 
decimate, 258. 
deed, 9, 266. 
deep, 256. 
deepen, 256. 
deep-throated, 51 1, 
deer, 44, 266, 317. 
defence, 79, 296. 
defend, 254. 
defended 254, 
deficit, 302. 
degree, 69, 
dehonestation, 299. 
deify, 257. 
dejectedness, 269. 
delectable, 345. 
delight, 79. 
delinition, 299, 
deli table, 3^5. 
Delta, Greek letter, 

197. 
delve, 229, 237. 
Denge Ness, 269. 



deodorize, 258. 
depart, 79. 
depend upon it, 454. 
Derby, 146. 
derogatory, 350. 
Derwent, 20, 
description, 79, 298. 
desirable, 336. 
desire, 79, 
despotic, 353. 
destiny, 79. 
desyre, 138. 
detecting, 482, 
detective, 348. 
detriment, 281. 
deuce, 56, 
deuysement, 280. 
development, 281. 
devize, 293. 
devotee, 289. 
devour, 79. 
dexterity, 297. 
dexterous, 346. 
Dialects, 93, 96. 
dice, 56. 
Dick, 312, 
did, 246, 251, 256. 
diet, 79. 
difference, 296. 
diffidence, 296. 
dig, 230. 
digestible, 79, 
dignify, 257. 
diligent, 79. 
dim, 428. 
dip, 9, 108. 
directly, 449, 452. 
dirty, 327. 
disastrous, 346. 
discreet, 79. 
discretion, 79. 
disdain, 79. 
disese and wo, 81. 
disguize (Spenser), 293. 
dish, 18. 
dislodge, 79. 
dismissal, 300. 
disobedience, 332. 
disobedient, 332. 
dispite, 79. 



disposal, 300. 
disquietude, 301, 
distinctive, 348, 349. 
distress, 79. 
distributing, 482. 
ditcher, 268. 
ditement, -280. 
diurnal, 339. 
dive, 237, 239. 
divine, 137, 349. 
division, 79. 
do, 109, 208, 246, 251, 

256, 471, 490. 
doctor, 79. 
doctorship, 275. 
dog, 109, 296. 
doge, 109. 
dogge, 138, 190. 
dog-kennel, 505. 
dogmatist, 307. 
dole, 88. 
doleful, 88. 
dolven, 230. 
-dom, 268, 271. 
dome, 42. 
domestic, 339, 340. 
domestical, 341. 
done, 246, 251. 
done-up, 418. 
doom, 266, 272. 
door, 9, 266. 
Dorset Dialect, 59, 

93, 144, 491. 

dostu, 2 2 2. 

dotard, 290. 
doth (doeth), 124. 
double, 79. 
Double Meaning, 

550. 
doubt, 79. 
doughtful, 336. 
doughty, 327. 
dove (noun), 129. 
dova (verb pret.), 238. 
down, 364. 

down (of a peach), 266. 
downward, 334. 
dozen, 382. 
drag, 9. 
drank, 230. 



INDEX, 

drastic, 353. 
draught, 126. 
draw, 230. 
drawn, 230. 
dreriment, 28 1. 
dreryhedd, 274. 
dress, 79. 
drew, 230. 
drink, 9, 230, 266. 
drive, 9, 230. 
driven, 230. 
drone, 266. 
drove, 230. 
drunk, 230, 
drunkard, 290. 
drunken, 230, 233, 

324- 
Dual pronouns, 391, 

393- 
duchess, 319. 
dug, 230. 
duke, 42. 
dulcify, 257. 
dullard, 290. 
Dunbar, Scottish 

poet, 28. 
durst, 249. 
dusty, 327. 
Dutch, 326. 
Dutch Language, 

16, 275, 396. 
duty, 85. 
dwelling, 2 40. 

E, the vowel, 108. 

-e final, 140. 

EA, pronunciation of, 

152. 
EA = water, 155. 
each, 410. 
Eadred, 272. 
eagle-eyed, 511. 
EAHTA, 155. 

EALD, 165. 

ear, 19, 266. 

earl, 42, 266. 

earlier, 419. 

Early English Text 
Society, 245, 273, 
284, 331, 344. 

Pp 



577 

earth, 266. 
earthquake, 135. 
ease, 152. 
east, 266. 

eat, 10, 16, 153, 230. 
eaten, 230. 

ecchoed (Spenser), 138. 
Ecgbriht, 112. 
-ed, 323. 33^. 333- 
edge, 266. 
edge-tool, 505. 
edify, 257. 
educate, 254. 
educated, 254. 
-ee, 289. 
-eer, 289. 
effect, 79. 
effeminacy, 271. 
effeniinateness, 271, 
eftsoones, 368. 

eglantine, 21. 
egotist, 307. 
eight, 155. 
-el, 323. 330. 
elective, 348. 
electrify, 257. 
elegant, 343, 350, 351, 

355- 
element, 280. 
elementary, 529. 
elf, 195. 
elf-needled, 512. 
elixir, 304. 
elm, 21, 266. 
elmen, 324, 325. 
elsewhere, 429. 
elvisch, 327. 
'em = them, 413. 
embellish, 78. 
embroider, 87. 
eminence, 296. 
emparement, 280. 
Emphasis, 528. 
empress, 5 J 9. 
emprize, 293. 
empty, 327. 
-en, 316, 324, 481. 
enchantment, 79, 280. 
enchauntement, 280. 



578 



INDEX. 



-ence, 296. 
-ency, 296. 
endite, 79. 
endless, 136. 
endure, 79. 
ene = eync, eyes, 316. 
engender, 79. 
-enger, 285. 
Englisc, 17, 27. 
'English Language,' 
68. 

— a peculiar fea- 
tvire of, 468. 

— sibilaney of, 88. 
Ennglish, 50. 
Enngliss, 50. 
enough, 126, 280 «. 
enprysonment, 280. 
ensample, 79. 

-ent, 350. 
enterprize, 293. 
envy, 79. 

EC (vowel-combina- 
tion), 130. 
EOFORwic, 118. 
-eous, 346. 
epitome, 302, 303. 
equality, 297. 
equilibrium, 302, 
equity, 297. 
equivalent, 352. 
er (conjunction), 451. 
-er, 287, 288, 326.'' 
eradicate, 258. 
ere (conjunction), 451. 
erroneous, 346, 347. 
-ery, 277. 

-es (adverbial), 368. 
escaper, 288. 
esculent, 318, 352. 
-tst, 342. 
esplanade, 303. 
-esque, 341. 
-ess, 294, 319. 
-esse, 294. 
Essex, 27. 
estate, 79. 
estimable, 336. 
estimate, 258. 
-et, 283. 



eternal, 339. 
eternall, 138. 
etestu, 221. 
ethic, 353. 
Eton, 155. 

-ette, 283. / 

evangelize, 258. 
even, 324. 
everlastingness, 265, 

269. 
every, 410. 
everybody, 406. 
every ch, 410. 
every chon, 410. 
everything, 408^ 
evidence, 296. 
evil, 266, 323. 
evolutionism, 306. 
ewe, no, 119. 
exalt, 116. 
excarnification, 299. 
excellence, 79. 
exchange, 79. 
exchange-stroke, 515. 
exclusive, 348. 
exculpate, 258. 
exculpatory, 350. 
Exe, 2D. 

exercize (Spenser), 293. 
exhaust, 116. 
exigence, 296. 
exotic, 116, 
expedient, 350. 
expence, 296. 
expense, 296, 
experience, 296. 
expiatory, 350. 
export, 116, 117. 
expostulate, 258. 
expound, in. 
extend, 116. 
externalization, 298. 
extraordinary, 363. 
-ey, 327. 
eye, 262, 266. 
eyen, 315. 
eyes, 67. 
eyne, 315. 
eysement, 280. 



fabulosity, 297. 

face, 79, 81. 

facet, 283. 

faculty, 79. 

fain, 324. 

fair, 322, 354, 355. 

fair-haired, 511. 

fairy, 195, 278. 

fairy-cupped, 512. 

faith, 267. 

faithful, 138. 

fall, 107, 230. 

fallacy, 296. 

fallen, 230. 

Families of Speech, 

473- 
fancy-free (Shakspeare), 

fantastic, 340. 

far, 364. 

far-fetched, 511, 

far-seeing, 510. 

fare, 128. 

farewells, 180. 

fashion, 279. 

fast, 256. 

fasten, 256. 

fastidious, 343. 

fastuous, 346. 

fat, 107. 

fat = a vessel, 266. 

fate, 107. 

father, 4, 267. 

fathom, 266. 

fatty, 327. 

fawn-skin-dappled,5 1 2 . 

fealty, 297. 

FEAWA, 116. 

feat, 153. 
feather, 267. 
feculent, 352. 
fed, 254. 
feed, 4, 254. 
feel, 247. 

feet, 67, 246, 317. 
feffement, 280. 
felicity, 79. 
fell, 230, 233. 
fellow-circuiteer, 289. 
fellowship, 275. 



INDEX. 



579 



felony, 79, 278. 
felt, 247. 
fervor, 299. 
fervour, 299. 
fetch, 247. 
few, 116, 

M 257. 

feyjity&e, 29I. 
fiddler, 2 '^8. 
fidelity, 297. 
fiduciary, 300. 
field, 266- 

field-path, 470, 504. 
fight, 230, 262, 267. 
figure, 79, 254. 
figured, 254. 
filly, 4. 
filthy, 327. 
find, 230. 
finding, 482. 
fine, 343, 355. 
finesse, 295. 
finger. 267. 
finish, 78. 
fire, 4. 

fire-balloon, 505. 
fire-bote, 84. 
firmament, 280, 281, 

282. 
fish, 4, 266. 
fisher, 268. 
fishery. 277. 
fishwife, 505. 
fist, 4. 
fit, 108. 
fitz, 57. 

five, 4, 59, 227. 
five-words-long, 507. 
flail, 43. 
Plat adjective, 356, 

468. 

— adverb, 361. 

— pronoun-adverb, 

417. 
— syntax, 461. 
flatling, 330, 36S. 
flatteress, 320. 
flatulent, 352. 
flax, 21. 
flea, 151. 



fled, 247. 
flee, 247. 
Flemish, 326 
flesh, 266, 
Fletcher, 287. 
flew, 230. 

Plexion, 223, 508. 
Piesional adjective, 

357- 
■ — adverb, 365. 

— pronoun-adverb, 

429. 

— syntax, 474, 
flighty, 327. 
fling, 230. 
float, 237, 
flockmel, 367. 
flood, 266. 
flourish, 78. 
flower, 79. 
floweret, 283, 
flowery, 327, 
flown, 230. 
flung, 230. 

fly, 230, 266. 
flying, 486. 
foal, 4. 
foe, 109, 129. 
foes, 316. 
foil, 129. 

/oison = plenty, 279. 
fold, 237, 266. 
folk, 406. 
folly, 79. 
/owe = foes, 316. 
foody, 327/ 32S. 
fool-hardise, 291. 
foot, 4, 246, 266. 
foot-sore, 507. 
fopperies, 277. 
for, 4, 187, 434, 436, 

445. 457- 
for all that, 449. 
forcible, 336. 
fore, 4, 109, 
forego, 509. 
foreigners, 24. 
fore-right, 509. 
foreshorten, 509. 
forest, 79, 186. 

P p 2 



for ever, 431. 

forgetive, 348. 

forget-me-not, 501, 
503- 

forlorn, 238, 509. 

form, 79. 

formal, 339. 

forsake, 230. 

for . . . sake (with gen- 
itive between), 443. 

forsaken, 230. 

for something, 431. 

forsook, 230. 

forsooth, 534. 

forth, 4, 61. 

for the sake of, 444. 

fortune, 79. 

forward, 509. 

fot = fetched, 247.. 

fought, 230. 

foughten, 230, 233. 

Foulness, 269. 

found, 230. 

foundeynent, 280. 

founder, 319. 

foundress, 319. 

four, loa 

four times, 383. 

fowl, 44, 266. 

fowler, 268. 

fox, 319. 

franchise, 291, 292. 

fraternity, 79. 

fraternize, 258. 

fraudulent, 352. 

Frederick, 138. 

fredom, 82. 

freeze 230. 

French, 62, 326. 

French influence, 
42, 65, 72, 78, 85, 
89, 97, III, 113, 
115, 130, 133, 146, 
151. 253, 257, 267, 
276, 280, 293, 312, 
315. 336. 345. 358. 
370, 375> 381, 38'^^ 
392, 401, 437, 442, 
445, 471, 479, 487, 
544. 552. 



58o 



INDEX. 



French contrasted 
with. English, 133, 
398, 493, 514. 

tresh, 322. 

fret, 237. 

friend, 190, 257, 

friendship, 275, 508. 

frighten, 257. 

frog, 266. 

Froissart, Chro- 
nicler, 279, 449. 

frolic, 185. 

from, 4. 

Frome, 20. 

from whence, 431. 

frost, 266. 

froward, 334, 509. 

froze, 230. 

frozen, 230. 

fruitful, 336. 

fruitless, 336. 

fruit-shaped, 512. 

fudge ! 171. 

full, 139, 322. 

-full. 32 3> 336. 
full-blown, 507, 
Fuller, Thomas,344. 
fungi, 318. 
fungus, 302. 
Furness, 269. 
furnish, 78. 
further, 136, 420. 
furze, 21, 266. 
furzen, 316. 
Furzen Leaze, 326. 
fusillade, 303, 304. 
fusty, 327. 

fyi 257. 



G, the letter, iii. 
Gadites, 302. 
Gaelic, 340. 
Gaelic Language, 

22. 
gall, 107. 
Gallic, 340. 
gan, 251. 
gander, 107. 
gap, 263. 



gape, 107, 262. 
garden, 18, 262, 276. 
gardener, 28 
garden flowers, 357. 
garden herb, 470. 
garding, 481. 
garnement, 280. 
garrison, 279. 
gastric, 353. 
gathering (infinitive), 
482. 

gay, 79- 
gayte=^02X%, 317. 

GE, 117, 
GEAR, 117. 
GEARD, 117. 
GEARO, 117. 

geese, 317. 
geet, 317. 

GELYFAN, 227. 

generalize, 258. 
generalization, 195. 
generous, 347. 
gent, 309. 
gentle, 79, 190. 
gefitrise, 291. 
geometry, 79. 

GEORN, I I 7. 

German, 326. 
German influence, 

463- 
German Language, 

5, 9, 200, 202, 204, 

226, 243, 272, 316, 

319. 331. 334. 357. 

392, 396, 400, 439. 

479,489, 505, 512. 
germinate, 254. 
germinated, 254. 
GESE, 117. 
get, 230. 

gewesen (Germ.), 232. 
gewcrden(Germ.), 243. 
geyn (Cambridgeshire), 

364. 
ghost, 266. 

GIELD, 1x7. 

gifted, 333. 
gift-horse, 505. 
gigantesque, 341. 



gigantic, 340. 
gild, 254. 

GILPAN, 117. 
gilt, 254. 

gird, 254. 

girl. 276. 

girl of the period, 358. 

girl-graduates, 505. 

girt, 254. 

GIT, I 17. 

give, III, 230. 
give me, 475. 
given, 230. 
gladsome, 331. 
glass, 266. 
glen, 22. 
glide, 230, 237. 
glisten, 257. 
globose, 348. 
glod, 230, 233. 
glorious, 346. 
gloriose, 348. 
Gloucester, 20, 48. 
gluttony, 57. 
gnat, 266. 
gnaw, 230. 
gnawn, 230, 233. 
gnew, 230, 233. 
go, 109, 230. 
goat, 266, 317. 
goat herd, 505. 
goddess, 319. 
godhead, 274. 
godly, 330. 
gold, 149. 
golden, 325. 
golden-shafted, 511. 
gone, 230. 
good, 95, 322, 361. 
good-bye, 541. 
goodlike, 509. 
goodly, 330, 509. 
good cheap, 190. 
goodman, 520, 522. 
goodness, 85, 269. 
goose, 227, 266. 
got, 230. 
Gothic, 340. 
Gothic Family of 
languages, 6, 476. 



INDEX. 



581 



Gothic ( = Moeso- 
Gothic) Dialect, 
12, 14, 226, 245, 

315- 
gotten, 230. 
gouty, 327. 
governance, 79 
governess, 319. 
Gower, the poet, 68, 

75, 78. 
gown and gownd, ill. 
grace, 278. 
graceful, 509. 
gracious, 346. 

GRAFE, 230. 

graff, 183. 
Grammar, 176, 201, 

264, 378- 
grandiose, 348. 
grandsir (American), 

537- 
grant, 79. 
graphic, 353. 
grass, 21, 544. 
grasshopper, ill. 
gratitude, 301. 
gratuity, 297. 
grave, 237. 
graven, 230, 233. 
gray. iii. 
great, 152, 322. 
Greek influence, 

259' 302, 308, 318, 

340, 515. 
Greek Language, 

191, 214, 2 16, 218, 

323, 246, 374, 415, 

440, 468, 486, 511, 

530. 
grew, 530. 
grig, III. 
grim, 324. 
Grimm's Law, 2, 5, 

Grimm, quoted, 245, 

423- 
grind, 230. 
grinder, 268. 
grocer, 287. 
GROF, 230. 



grotesque, 341. 
ground, 230, 266. 
groveling, 368. 
grow, 230. 
growing, 240. 
grown, 230. 
guarantee, 289. 
guardian, 277. 
guerdon, 140. 
guess, 140. 
guest, 1 40, 266. 
guild, 140. 
guile, 140. 
guilt, 140. 
guilty, 328. 
guize (Spenser), 293. 
Guthlac, 274. 

H, the letter, 112. 

ha! 180. 

habiliment, 281. 

habitual, 339. 

had, 354, 

had (subjunctive), 477- 

hadde-y-wiste, hady- 

wist, 514. 
haggard, 290. 
hag-ridden, 23. 
hail ! 172. 
hale, 128. 
halidam, 272. 
hall, 42, 107. 
hand, 190, 266. 
handicap, 181. 
handiwork, 505. 
handloom, 505. 
handsaw, 194. 
handsome, 331. 
handwriting, 505. 
handy-work or hand- 

ywork? 505. 
hang, 230. 
happen, 254. 
happened, 254. 
happiness, 508. 
harbinger, 285. 
harbour, 79. 
hard, 322. 
harden, 257. 
hard-grained, 511. 



hardihood, 274. 

hardiment, 281. 

hardy, 328. 

hare, 128, 

harper, 268. 

Harris, author of 

Hermes, 355.!4i3. 

455- 
Harry, 312. 
hasardery, 57. 
haste, 79, 256, 
hasten, 256. 
hastow, 222. 
hat, 107. 
hatchet, 283. 
hate, 107. 
hater, 288. 
hatred, 272. 
haughty, 327. 
haunt, 7g. 
have, 254. 
Havelok, the poem 

of, 60. 
haw, 21. 
hawk, 129. 
hazard, 57. 
he, 108, 390, 396, 398, 

399,412. 
head, 257, 266. 
-head, 274. 
heady, 327. 
heal, 237. 
heap, 33, 36, 266. 
i(jpar, 168, 247. 
heart, 266. 
heart-sick, 507. 
heart-weary, 507. 
heart-whole, 507. 
hearth, 43. 
hearth-stone, 505. 
hearty, 327. 
heat, 152. 
heathen, 324. 
heathendom, 272. 
heave, 230. 
heaven, 59, 267. 
heaviness, 269. 
Hebraize, 259. 
Hebrew influence, 

397- 



5S2 



INDEX. 



HebreTV Language, 

2, 330, 415. 458, 
468, 488, 504, 5,9. 

-hed, 274. 
-hedd, 274.. 
hedge, 128. 
hedge-flowers, 357. 
heigh-ho ! 166. 
height, 256, 267. 
heighten, 256, 
heir-loom, 505. 
held, 230. 
helm, 266. 
help, 230. 
hempen, 324, 325. 
hems, 180. 
hence, 429. 
her, 394, 395. 
her (dative), 476. 
herb-garden, 470. 
herd, 247. 
here, 429. 
Hereberct, 112. 
heroic, 340. 
heron, 194. 
herself, 396. 
HI, 412. 
high, 109, 322. 
High Dutch, 6. 
high-mindedness, 269. 
high-toned, 511. 
hight, 245. 

Highway, why the 
Queen'^s, 68. « 
hill, 266. 
him, 389, 395, 396, 

3Q7'4i3- 
him (dative), 476. 
himself, 396, 3(^7. 
himselfe (Spenser), 1 3-. 
hind, 43. 
hine, 221, 
hing (Scotch), 230, 

233- ' 

HIRE (pronoun), 394. 
his, 223, 394, 395. 
history, 310. 
hither, 429. 
Hivites, 302. 
hoe, no, 130, 



hoised, in. 

hold, 230. 

holden, 230, 234. 

holp, 230, 233. 

holpen, 230. 

holt, 21. 

holy - water - sprinckle, 

522. 
homage, 42. 
home, 43. 

home-enfolding, 513. 
homeward, 334. 335- 
honest, 79. 
honey-coloured, 512. 
honour, 79, 82, 129. 
honorable, 133. 
hood, 266. 
-hood, 268, 274, 
hoof, 266. 
Hooker, Richard, 

420,431, 432, 441, 

453. 457- 
hop, 109. 
hope, 109, 253. 
hopefulness, 270. 
hoped = hope-did (?) 

256. 
hoper, 288. 
hopper, 288. 
home (Spenser), 137. 
Home Tooke, 167, 

183,413.453.455. 
horrible, 79. 
horrify, 257. 
horrour, 129. 
horse, 266, 
horse-box, 505. 
horse-race, 470, 504. 
hoseli = to house!, 61. 
hosen, 316. 
host, 79, 
hot, 10, 128. 
hound, 266. 
hour, 79. 

house, 43, 262, 266. 
housen (provincial), 

316. 
housewife, 539. 
hove, 230. 
how, 194, 421, 449. 



howbeit, 454, 479. 
however, 432. 
howsoever, 432. 

HRYCG, 128. 

Huaetberct, 112. 
hub (American), 31 1. 
huckster, 320. 
hum, 180; 
human, 136, 
humane, 136. 
humanity, 297. 
humble, 79. 
humour, 79. 
hung, 230, 234. 
husk, 21. 
HWA, 125. 

HW^L, 125. 
HW^R, 125. 
HWffiS, 125, 
HW^T, 125. 
HWJETE, 125. 
HW^T-STAN, 125. 
HWEOL, 125. 
HV7I, 125. 

nwiL, 125. 

HWISPERUNG, 125. 
HWISTLERE, I 25. 
HWIT, 125. 
HWYLC, 125. 

hydraulic, 119. 
hypocrisy, 119. 
hypothesis, 119. 
hyrst, 120. 
hyson, 120. 
hyssop, 119. 
Hythe, 120. 

I, the pronoun, 194, 

212, 391. 
I, the vowel, 106, 109. 
-ian, 325, 352. 
-ible, 336. 
10 (Saxon pronoun), 

220. 
-ic, 339. 352. 
-ical, 340. 
-ice, 291. 
ice, 266. 
Icelandic poetry, 

532. 



583 



ichave, 222. 

icy-pearled, 5 1 1, 

idle, 323. 

idolism, 305, 

idolist, 307. 

-ier, 289, 

if, 453, 456, 457. 

-if, 328. 

ile = I'll (Shakspeare) 

222. 
ilk (Scotch), 410. 
ill. 364- 

ill-conditioned, 332. 
illustrious, 347. 
image, 79. 
imagery, 277. 
imaginative, 56, 348. 
impetuosity, 297. 
implacable (Spenser), 

338. 
impound, ill. 
impotence, 296. 
improvement, 281, 

in. 37» 194. 364. 441- 
in a fashion, 431. 
in a manner, 431. 
in a sort of w^ay, 431. 
in a way, 431. 
incense, 296. 
incog., 309. 
incony, 329. 
increase, 79. 
indebtedness, 269, 270. 
indeed, 169, 190. 
indelible, 425. 
index, 302. 
Indian, 352. 
indicate, 258. 
indifFerentist, 307. 
indolent, 352. 
Indo-European lan- 
guages, I. 
-ine, 349. 
in earnest, 375, 
in fact, 375. 
in good faith, 375. 
in jest, 375. 
in joke, 375. 
in presence, 375, 
in presence of, 448. 



m some sort, 431. 
in spight of, 443. 
in spite of, 443. 
in truth, 375. 
in vain, 375. 
in vi^hich, 450. 
inextinguishable, 425. 
infallibilist, 307. 
infernal, 79. 
Infinitive, 379, 471, 

481,405. 
Inflectional stage of 

language, 219, 

468, 508. 
influence, 296. 
influential, 339. 

-ing. 323. 329. 368, 

481. 
-inger, 285. 
ingle-nook, 505. 
injure, 255. 
ink, 262. 
ink-horn, 505. 
inky, 327. 

i-nowe = enough, 280. 
inquisitorial, 339. 
insolent, 350, 352. 
insolvent, 350. 
instead of, 444. 
instrument, 79, 280, 

281. 
integrity, 297. 
intellectual, 339. 
intelligential, 339. 
mtendiment, 281. 
intent, 79. 
intentional, 339. 
intercede, 108. 
interest, 302, 303. 
interesting, 343. 
interests, 318. 
internecine, 349. 
intervene, 108. 
intolerable, 425. 
intrudress, 320. 
invalid, 524. 
invalidate, 258. 
inventive, 348. 
invincible, 425. 
inwardness, 265, 270. 



-ion, 298. 
Irish, 326. 
Irish modulation, 

.555- 
irksome, 331. 
irrationals, 185. 
irrepressible, 336. 
irony, 304. 
is, the substantive verb, 

218,' 220, 241. 
-ise, 291. 
~ish, 326, 328. 
-ism, 305. 
issue, 277. 
-ist, 307, 
-istic, 353. 
it, 396. 
Italian, 326. 
Italian influence, 
^ 284, 342. 
Italian Language, 

29, 392, 492. 
-ite, 301. 
item, 302. 
items, 318. 
-ition, 298. 
-ity, 297. 

lUNG, 118. 

-ive, 348. 
ivy, 266. 
-ize, 258, 

J, the letter, 113. 
Jack, 114, 312. 
jailor, 79. 
jangle, 55, 79. 
jangler, 55, 113. 
jangleress, 55. 
jape, 55, 107. 
japer, 55. 
japery, 55. 
japeworthy, 55. 
jaunty, 327. 
jealous, 113, 346. 
Jebusites, 302. 
jeopardise, 294. 
jeopardy, 57, 79, 129. 
jest, 113. " 
jewel, 79, 113. 
Jewry, 277. 



584 

Jews, 67. 

Joanna - Southcotites, 

302. 
jocose, 136. 
jocund, 79. 
John, 312. 
join, 8o, 113, 147. 
joint, 147. 
joke, 255. 
joked, 255. 
jolif, 328. 
jollity, 81. 
jolly, 80, 113, 328. 
journey, 80, 113. 
joust, 113. 
joviality, 297. 
joy, 80, 113. 
joyous, 346. 
jubilant, 350. 
Judaize, 259. 
judge, 80, 113, 123. 
judgment, 281. 
Judgment, the means 

of expressing, 224, 

354- 
juggement, 280. 
J'Jggler, 55. 
July, 113. 
jump, 420. 
junket, 283. 
just, 362, 418, 452. 
justice, 80, 113, 195, 

291. 
justifiable, 336. 
Jutes, the nation, 1 7. 

K, the letter. T13. 
K, in Swedish, 128. 
keel, 266. 
keep, 114, 247. 
liempa, 114. 
hene, 114. 
Kent, 20, 1 1 4. 
kept, 247. 
kiln, 144. 
kin, 114. 
kind, 81. 
kindle, 255. 
kindred, 272, 508. 
kine, 317. 



INDEX. 

king, 42, 1 14, 265, 266, 

267. 
king-cup, 505. 
kingdom, 272, 508. 
kinglet, 283. 
King's English, 68. 
Kirk (Scotch), 127. 
kite, 109. 
knave, 266. 
knee, 266. 
kneel, 247. 
knelt, 247. 

knight, 262, 266, 357. 
knighthood, 357. 
knocked-up, 418. 
knot, 266. 
know, 37, 251. 
knowledge, 36, 1 28,273. 
koyntise, 291. 
kye (Scotch), 317. 
kyind (American), 107. 

-1 (terminal), 323. 

la ! 163. 

labouring, 486. 

-lac, 273. 

lack, 114. 

lackadaysical, 166. 

lade, 128, 230, 

laden, 230. 

ladyship, 275. 

laggard, 290. 

laid, 254. 

lain, 230. 

lake, 128.- 

lake ( = to play), 273. 

lakefellow, 273. 

lakers, 273. 

lamb, 266. 

lamentable, 336. 

lamp-oil, 505. 

land, 107, 128, 262, 

266. 
landed, 332. 
landlordism, 306. 
landscape, 275. 
language, 80, 283. 
Langue d'oil, d'oc, 

427. 
large, 80. 



large-moulded, 51 f. 

largess, 80, 295. 

latch, 128. 

latchet, 283. 

late, 107, 322. 

lateward, 334, 

Latin language, 32, 

191,217, 468, 537. 
Latin, usurping it 

over French, 345. 
latitude, 301. 
laugh, 255, 266. 
laughter, 36, 126. 
laundress, 319. 
law, 67. 
lay, 230, 254. 
Layamon, 48, 132, 

172, 410. 
layed = laid, 124. 
-le, 323. 
lea, 151. 

Lea, family name, 155. 
lead, 254. 
leaden, .^24, 325, 
leaf, 266, 318. 
leafy, 327, 
lean, 247. 
leap, 237, 247. 
leain, 254. 
learned (adj.), 332. 
learnt or learned, 254. 

LEAS, 238. 

least (modern lest), 45 2. 
leather, 267. 
leave, 247. 
leaves, 318. 
-ledge, 273. 
leek, 21. 
leeward, 334. 
left, 247. 
legibility, 297. 
leisured, 332, 333. 
lemonade, 303. 
lend, 254. 
length, 256, 267. 
lengthen, 256. 
Lent, 266. 
lent, 352. 

LEOSE, 238. 

lese, 230. 



-less, 323, 336. 

lessee, 289. 

lesson, 279. 

lessor, 289, 

let, 251, 492, 

-let, 283, 

lethargic, 340. 

letter, 102. 

letters, 102. 

Levites, 302. 

lice, 317. 

licence, 139, 296. 

license, 139. 

licht (Anglian), T12, 

113- 
lidless-eyed, 511. 
lie (jacere), 230. 
lie (mentiri), 237. 
lief, 322. 

lien or lain, 230, 234. 
life-long, 507. 
light, J09, 254, 267, 

322. 
lighten, 257. 
lightning, 136. 
light-o'-love, 514. 
LIHT, 125. 
like, 187, 322, 403, 

408, 437, 546. 
likelihood, 274. 
likely, 330. 
likeness, 546. 
liking, 546. 
lilac, 149. 
lilly (Spenser), 138. 
lily-handed, 511. 
limb-meal, 367. 
lime, 21. 
linch, 283. 

lincked (Spenser), 137. 
lineage, 80, 283. 
-ling, 368. 
Link, 283. 
liquidate, 258. 
lissom, 332. 
listener, 268, 
lit, 254. 
literary, 102. 
literature, J02. 
litten, 34. 



INDEX. 

little, 190, 323. 
livelihood, 275. 
liver, 267. 
lo! 163. 
load, 129. 

LOG, 163, 

Local names, 20, 48, 
120, 126, 155, 269, 
278, 283, 288, 323, 
326, 329, 358. 

lock, 237. 

-lock, 268, 273. 

loden, 230, 234. 

logic, 340. 

logical, 341. 

London, 20, 147. 

lonely-Wood, 522. 

long, 322, 365. 

longish, 327. 

longitude, 301. 

long-legged, 510. 

long of, 442. 

long on, 442. 

longsome, 332. 

look, 476, 

lookedst, 476. 

loop-hole, 505. 

lop, 109. 

lording (inf ), 486. 

lordship, 275. 

lore, 266. 

lorn, 230, 238. 

LOREN, 238. 

lose, 238, 247. 
lost, 238, 247. 
louse, 266. 
love, 59, 129. 
loved, 177. 
love-loyal, 507. 
loyalty, 297. 
lubbard, 338. 
lunching, 481. 
lust, 266. 
lustihed, 274. 
lusty, 327. 
luxation, 298. 
luxurious, 346, 347. 

-ly, 323. 330. 369- 

lynchet, 283. 
LYS, 317. 



585 

-m (terminal), 323, 

324- 
Macaulayesque, 34I, 
Madam, 80, 276. 
Madame (in French), 

398. 
madden, 257. 
made (short for maked), 

254. 
magazine, 304. 
magic, 80. 
magnificence, 296. 
magnitude, 301. 
maiden, 267. 
maidenhed, -hood, 274. 
maiden-meek, 507. 
main, 184, 267. 
mainspring, 505. 
majestic, 340. 
majority, 297. 
make, 107, 128, 254. 
make-believe, 513. 
makeshift, 513. 
make to, 471. 
make-weight, 513. 
making, 268. 
making mouths at, 87. 
malady, 80. 
malevolent, 352. 
malice, 291, 292. 
malison, 279. 
mallard, 290. 
malt, 107. 
Maltese, 342. 
maltster, 320. 
man, 33, 34, 107, 128, 

246, 266, 404, 405. 
manageable, 336. 
Manassites, 302. 
Manchester, 20, 
manhood, 274. 
mankind, 501, 508. 
manner, 80. 
man-of-war, 504, 514. 
manor, 20. 
mansion, 80. 
mantle, 80. 
marchioness, 319, 
Marcionites, 302. 
marine, 349. 



5S6 



INDEX. 



marionette, 283. 
mark, 262, 266. 
marketable, 336. 
marmalade, 303. 
Maronites, 302. 
marplot, 513. 
marriage. So. 
marriage - settlements, 

470. 
marrying (inf.), 482. 
marsh-mallow, 505. 
martial, 339. 
martirement, 280. 
martyrdom, 272. 
masquerade, 303. 
master, 80. 
masterpiece, 514. 
match, 127. 
math, 267. 
mathematical, 341. 
matter, 36, 80. 
matter-of-fact, 357. 
matutinal, 339. 
majindemens, 282. 
may (symbolic), 206, 

249, 251, 492. 
mayoralty, 297. 
me, 108. 
me (dative), 475. 
-meal, 366. 
mealy, 327. 
mean, 247. 
meaned, 255. 
meanness, 269, 
measure, 152, 290. 
measureable, 80. 
meat, 80. 
mechanical, 341. 
medium, 302, 303. 
meed, 266. 
meek-eyed, 511. 
meet, 247. 
melt, 230. 
memento, 302. 
memorandum, 302. 
memory, 80. 
men, 317. 

men of learning, 358. 
men of property, 358. 



men of this generation, 

35». 
-ment, 280. 
mention, 255. 
mentioned, 255. 
mercenary, 80. 
merchandise, 291, 293. 
merchant, 80, 147. 
meritorious, 346. 
merry, 354. 
mesmerist, 307. 
mesmerize, 258. 
message, 283. 
messenger, 285. 
met, 238, 247. 
mete ( = measure), 237, 

238. 
methinks, 476. 
methodical, 341. 
Metre, 557. 
mice, 246, 317. 
Michaelmas, 63. 
mid, 38. 
middle, 323. 
Middle Voice, 486. 
Middlesex, 27. 
might, 109, 206, 249, 

267, 492. 
mighty, 327. 
mignonette, 283. 
migratory, 350. 

MIHT, 125. 

milch, 357. 
milky, 327. 
miller, 287. 
millstone-grit, 503. 

MU:-PADAS, 18. 

Milton, John, 184, 
419. 49 S 498^ 540. 

554- 
mim, 324. 
mimminy - primminy, 

324- 
mine, 109, 392, 475. 
minion, 277. 
minister, 80. 
ministerialist, 307, 
minutely, 365. 
minutiae, 302. 
miracle, 80. 



mirth, 81. 
mischief, 80. 
misease, 152. 
Miss, 310. 
missionariness, 270. 
missionary, 350. 
mist, 266. 
mistake, 509. 
misty, 327. 
mitigate, 258. 
mockery, 277. 
mock-solemn, 507. 
modernism, 305. 
modicum, 302. 
modify, 257. 
moist, 80. 
moldiwarp, 310. 
mole (talpa), 310. 
mollify, 257. 
molten, 230. 
moment, 280. 
mon (Scottish), 128. 
monarchize, 258, 
monastic, 353. 
monger, 268. 
monied, 332. 
Monophysites, 302. 
monopolize, 258. 
Monothelites, 302. 
Monsieur, 398. 
monster, 80. 
mood, 10. 
moody, 327, 328. 
moon, 266. 
mop, 109. 
moral, 80. 
morality, 297. 
more, 207. 
Mormonites, 302. 
mortal, 80. 

mortall (Spenser), 138. 
mortgagee, 289. 
mortgagor, 289. 
mortify, 257. 
moss, 21. 
mosfe, 249. 
mote, 174, 249, 251. 
motive, 348, 349. 
mother, 267. 
mourn, 237. 



587 



mouse, 246, 266. 
mouth, 227, 266. 
move, 129. 
mowe, 251. 
much, 188, 202, 322. 
muleteer, 289. 
mulierosity, 297. 
multitude, 301. 
multitudinous, 346. 
munificence, 296. 
murky, 327. 
must, 180, 249. 
mustard, 290. 
musty, 327. 
mutton, 44, 94. 
MTS, 317. 
mystery, loi. 

-n (terminal), 323, 324. 
N (particle), 421, 425, 

427. 
nadir, 304. 
nail, 266. 
nam, 221. 
name, 128. 
nap, 107. 
nape, 107. 
narcotic, 340, 
narrative, 349. 
Nash Point, 269. 
nasty, 327. 
nativity, 297. 
natural, 80. 
naturall, 138. 
naturalness, 270. 
nature, 81. 
Nautical speech., 

509- 

navestu, 221. 
Naze, The, 269. 

NE, 422, 423, 428. 

near, 364, 441. 
neat-handed, 511. 
necessitous, 346. 
necht (Anglian), 112, 

113- 

Ned, 312. 
need-nots, 503. 
needs, 368. 
Negation, 421, 



negligence, 296. 
neighbour, 129, 299. 
neighbourhood, 273, 
Nell, 312. 
nelt, 221. 

-ness, 268, 269, 271. 
nest, 266. 
net, 266. 
Neustria, 278. 
never, 194, 421. 
nevertheless, 432, 452. 
new, 322. 
new-fangled, 323. 
new-fangleness, 269. 
Newport Pagnell, 18. 
next, 442. 

Nibelungen Lied, 6. 
nice, 343, 356. 
nicety, 297. 
nigardise, 291. 
niggard, 290. 
nigh, 322, 441. 
night, 109. 
night-cap, 514. 
nightshade, 21. 

NIHT, 126. 
NIMAN, 39. 

nine-pins, 505. 
nip, 108. 
no, 421. 
nobody, 406. 
no doubt, 454. 
noisy, 327. 
Noll, 312. 
nominate, 258. 
no more than, 452. 
none, 421. 

n«n-namelessness, 270. 
nor, 422, 423. 
Norman Conquest, 

42. 
Norsk, 325. 
north, 266. 
northness, 270. 
nose, 266. 
nostril, 501, 
Northern English, 

47, 48- 
not, 421, 423. 
not a bit^ 427, 



not any, 427. 
not a scrap, 427. 
not at all, 427, 431. 
not in the least, 427. 
not one, 427. 
notable, 336. 
note, 80. 
nothing, 408. 
notice, 291. 
noticeable, 336. 
notwithstanding, 432, 

454- 
nought, 421, 428. 
nourish, 78. 
nourishing, 80. 
novelty, 297. 
now, 207. 
noxious, 346. 
nugatory, 350. 
nullify, 257. 
number, 262, 
nuptial, 339. 
nuptials, 300. 
nut-crackers, 505. 

O, the interjection, 162. 
O, the vowel, 105. 
oak, 21, 266. 
oak-apple, 505. 
oasis, oases, 302, 318. 
oaten, 324, 325. 
oath, 266. 
oats, 43. 
obey, 34. 
oblidge, 129. 
obligatory, 350. 
oblige, 149. 
obscurity, 297. 
obstacle, 80. 
obstinate, 80. 
obstreperous, 346, 347. 
obtaining, 482. 
odium, 302. 
-oe, 130. 
oecumenical, 341. 
of, 37, 194, 357, 358, 

374, 39I' 395, 437, 

438, 442. 
of a child, 374. 
of a truth, 374. 



.^S8 



J' 



INDEX. 



of course, 431. 
of it, 430. 
of itself, 494. 
of me, 475. 
of necessity, 374. 
of old, 374. 
of whom, 450. 

OFERS.^WISCA, 115. 

off, 439. 

offence, 296. 

office, 80. 

officer, 80. 

Official Adjectives, 

354- 
offspring, 135. 
often, 366. 
oh ! 159, 161. 
oi (diphthong), 130. 
oil, oiled, 255. 
oily, 327. 
old, 322. 

' Old English,' 344. 
old-friendishness, 512. 
oldster, 320. 

on. 33- 37. 441- 
once, 383, 430. 
once upon a time, 430. 
one, 35, 38, 100, 143, 
406, 410, 415, 416, 

427, 4^8. 
one another, 406, 415. 
only, 330, 446. 
Onomatopoeia, 5.15. 
onus, 302. 
open, 324. 
open-hearted, 511. 
operate, 258. 
operose, 34*^. 
Ophites, 302. 
opinion, 80. 
oppression, 80. 
opulence, 296. 
opulent, 352, 
or, 434, 445. 451- 
-or, 299. 
orchard, 18. 
ordain, 80. 
order, 262. 
ordinance, 80. 
or ere, 452. 



or ever, 452. 
organizing (inf.), 482. 
orientalize, 259. 
orison, 279. 
Ormulum, 50, 122, 

383. 
orneme?it, 280, 
-ose, 348. 
-osity, 297. 
Ossian, 556. 
ostler, 80, 
otherwhere, 429. 
otherwise, 432. 
otiose, 348. 
ou (diphthong), 130. 
ought, 237, 428. 
our, 392, 464. 
-our, 299. 
-ous, 346. 
Ouse, 20. 
out, 186, 364, 
out of which, 494, 
outrageous, 346. 
over, 194, 4^9. 
overplus, 302. 
owe, owed, ought, 249. 
owl, 62. 
own, 324. 
ownership, 275. 
ox, 44, 266. 
oxen, 315. 
Oxford, 20. 
oynemetit, 280. 

P, the letter, 114. 
pace, 80. 

packe-horse, 505. 
paddock, 20. 
paint, 80. 
pair, 80, 99, 262, 
palace, 4?, 43. 
palette, 283. 
palfrey, 81. 
pall, 108. 
pamphleteer, 289. 
pan, 107. 
pane, 107. 
parchment, 282. 
pare, 99. 
parental, 339. 



park-paling, 505. 
parlement, 280, 300. 
parliament, 80, 281. 
parochial, 80. 
parochialize, 258. 
partial, 339. 
partialize (Shakspeare). 

258. 
partisan, 524. 
party, 80. 
pass, 80. 
passage, 283. 
passenger, 285. 
passive, 348. 
patched up, 418. 
patent, 80. 
path, 114, 266. 
path-field, 470, 504. 
patience, 195. 
patient, 80. 
patristic, 353. 
patronize, 258. 
patterned, 333. 
pavement, 280. 
payment, 280. 
pea, 151. 

peaceable, 336, 337. 
peaceableness, 269. 
peal, 310. 
pear, 18, 99. 
pease, 151. 
pease-cod, 21. 
peason, 151. 
peat bogs, 503. 
pedantic, 340. 
pen, 254. 
penance, 84. 
pensive, 348. 
pent, 254. 
pentice, 292. 
people, 129, 4^6. 
peradventure, 445, 446. 
perceive, 155. 
perfect, 80. 
perhaps, 445. 
perish, 78. 
Perizzites, 302. 
Persian, 352. 
persistive, 348. 
person, 80, 406. 



INDEX. 



personable, 338. 
personage, 284. 
pestilence, 80. 
petitionary, 350. 
petulant, 350, 351. 
Pet words, 343. 
phenomena, 318. 
phenomenon, 302. 
philosopher, 80. 
philosophize, 258. 
philosophy, 80. 
Phrasal Adjectives, 

357- 

Adverbs, 373. 

Pronoun - Ad- 
verbs, 431. 

Syntax, 487. 

physic, 340. 

pick-pocket, 513. 

pick-purse, 513. 

pick-thank, 513. 

Pickwick Papers, 
209. 

picturesque, 341. 

piecemeal, 367. 

pig, 276, 318. 

pight, 247. 

pig-nut, 505. 

pikestaff, 194. 

pimen , 280, 

pious, 346. 

pipe, 109. 

pit, 4. 

pitch, 247. 

pith, 266. 

pity, 80. 

placard, 290. 

place, 80. 

plain, 80. 

plashy, 327, 329. 

plastery, 328. 

plastic, 353. 

plit, 230. 

play, 114. 

plea, 151. 

pleasant, 80. 

please, 80, 152. 

pleasure, 152. 

pled ( = pleaded), 238. 

plenteous, 80. 



pleonasm, 308. 
pleonastic, 353. 
plet (Scottish), 230, 

234- 
plight, 82. 
plough, 43, 126. 
plow-bote, 84. 
plumb-bob, 266. 
plush-breeches, 514. 
Plutarchize, 258. 
poetick, 139. 
poetry, 277, 278. 
Poetry, 517. 
poignant, 80. 
point-of-honour, 514. 
poison, 279. 
poisonous, 346. 
Polish, 326. 
polite, 136, 
politick, 114, 139. 
pollard, 290. 
Polynesian, 352. 
pomp, 80. 
pomposity, 297. 
pooh ! 166. 
poor, 80. 
poppy-head, 514. 
populosity, 297. 
pork, 44, 94. 
porringer, 285. 
PORT, 18. 

port (Chaucer), 80. 
Portuguese, 342. 
positive, 348. 
Posset ( = Portishead), 

541- 
posterity, 297. 
post-office, 514. 
postulate, 258. 
potato-disease, 469. 
pottery, 277. 
pottinger, 285. 
pouch, 80. 
poultry, 277. 
pound, 80. 
poundage, 283. 
pourtray, 80. 
powder, 80. 
practicable, 336. 
practiser, 80. 



practize (Spenser), 293. 
prechement, 280. 
predicting (inf.), 483. 
preferable, 336. 
preference, 296. 
prejudice, 292. 
prelating (inf.), 486. 
preparatory, 350. 
Presbyterianism, 305. 
present (vb.), 255. 
Presentive words. 

195. 
pretence, 206. 
pretty, 327, 329, 354, 

363. 
prevalent, 352. 
preventive, 185. 
pride, 545. 
prim, 324. 
primitive, 324. 
prince, 42, 80. 
princess, 80, 319. 
prison, 80. 
privateer, 289. 
privily, 80. 
prize, 80. 
prize ox, 505. 
process, 80. 
proctorship, 275, 
procurable, 336. 
profitable, 336, 
promenade, 303. 
promise, 80. 
propagandism, 305. 
prophecy, 139, 262. 
prophesy, 139, 262. 
propitiatory, 350. 
proposal, 300. 
Protestantism, 305. 
protoplasm, 308, 309. 
protoplast, 308, 309. 
proud, 329, 545. 
prove, 80, 129. 
proven, 239. 
Provincial English, 

69, 93, 96, 204, 

316, 364.413- 
prude, 545. 
psaltery, 279. 
psha ! 166. 



590 



INDEX, 



Ptolemaic, 340, 
pubescence, 296. 
publicist, 307. 
pulled (Chaucer), 77- 
pullet, 44. 
punish, 78, 147. 
Punning, 550. 
purblind, 509. 
purchase, 80. 
pure-eyed, 511. 
pttrveatince, 72, 154. 
putted (Allan Ramsay), 
255- 



Q_, the letter, 115. 
quadripartition, 299. 
quaint, 342, 343, 341. 
quake, 115. 
qualify, 257. 
quality, 255. 
qualm, 1 15. 
Quantity, 520. 
quarrel, 115. 
quarry, 1 1 5. 
quart, 56, 1 15. 
quarter, 115. 
quarterne, 1 1 5. 
quash, 115. 
queen, 115. 
Queen's English, 

68, 91, 96. 
guei?itise, 291. 
queU, 115, 237. 
quern-stone, 505. 
question, 255, 262. 
questionable, 336. 
questioned, 255. 
quha (Scottish), 125. 
quhat, 125, 
quhilk, 125. 
quick, 115, 322. 
quire, 1 1 5, 
quit, 80, 115, 
Quixotic, 340, 



-r (terminal), 323, 326. 
racehorse, 470, 504. 
radish, 21. 



rail-road, 514. 
rain, 267. 
rain-bow, 514. 
rake, 266. 
ram, 266. 
rampant, 351. 
ran, 230. 
rang, 230. 
range, 262, 277. 
ransom, 80, 279, 541. 
rapidity, 297. 
rascal, 55. 
rascaldom, 272. 
rascally, 330, 
rat, 107. 
rate, 107. 
rathe, 322, 419, 
rather, 418, 419, 
rathe-ripe, 507. 
ratify, 257. 
raught, 142, 247. 
raven, 55, 267. 
ravener, 55. 
ravenous, 55. 
reach, 127, 247. 
readiness, 269. 
ready, 327. 
realm, 42. 
reason, 279. 
reasonable, 336. 
reasons (Shaksp.), 153. 
rebel, 136. 
receive, 155. 
reck, 142. 
reckless, 142. 
recklessness, 142. 
record, 136, 262. 
records, 67. 
-red, 268, 272. 
reed, 21. 
reedy, 327. 
reek, 237. 
referee, 289. 
reflective, 348. 
reft, 247. 
refusal, 300. 
region, 80, 298. 
rehearse, 80. 
remarkable, 336. 
remedy, 80. 



rend, 254. 
renown, 80. 
rent, 80, 254. 
rental, 300, 
reparative, 348, 349. 
representative, 349. 
reprieve, 155, 
repulsive, 348. 
reputable, 336. 
request, 80, 
requiem, 302. 
residual, 339. 
residuum, 302. 
resources, 525. 
respectable, 336. 
respiratory, 350. 
responsible, 336, 337. 
responsive, 337, 348. 
rest, 266. 
restore, 80, 
retentive, 348. 
reticence, 296. 
revel, 56. 
revellers, 56. 
revelling, 56. 
revelry, 56. 
revere, revered, 255. 
reverence, 80. 
revenues, 523. 
rhetorical, 341. 
rhizopodous, 346. 
rhyme, 119. 
Bhyme, 553, 558. 
rhyme and reason, 534. 
Bhythm, 500, 553, 

555- 
ribald, 55. 
ribaldry, 55. 
riches, 295. 
rick, 128, 266. 
-rick, 268, 275. 
rick-yard, 505. 
rid, 230, 234, 
ridden, 230. 
ride, 230. 
ridge, 128. 
right, 109, 267. 
righteous, 346. 
rind, 266. 
ring, 230, 266, 



INDEX. 



591 



ring-leader, 505. 

ringlet, -283. 

riotise, 291. 

riotous, 346. 

ripe, 322. 

rise, 230, 

risen, 230. 

ritch (Spenser), 128. 

ritualist, 307. 

river, 289. 

road, 129. 

roadster, 320, 

robby (infinitive), 61. 

robe, 80. 

Robert of Glouces- 
ter, 61. 

Robinsonian, 352, 

rock-thwarted, 510. 

rode, 230. 

roe, 109, 129. 

Roman, 326. 

Boman Numerals, 
197. 

Rome, 148. 

roof, 43, 266. 

rookery, 277. 

roomy, 324. 

root, 21. 

rope, 109, 266. 

rose, 230, 235. 

rosette, 283. 

rote, 80. 

rough, 126'. 

roune, loi. 

row, 237. 

rown, 102. 

royally, 80. 

royal-towered, 511. 

royalty, 42, 297. 

rubbishy, 328. 

rude, 80. 

rue, 237. 
Rugby, 240. 
rule, 109. 
run, 230. 
rung, 230. 
Runic, 340. 
Bunic characters, 
loi. 



runner, 288. 
Runes, 103. 
Russian, 326, 352. 
rustic, 340. 
rusty, 327. 

-ry, 277. 

rye, 2r, 43. 



-s (possessive), 474. 
sacrament, 280. 
sacrifice, 2. 
saddle, 128. 
sail, 262, 265, 266. 
sailyard, 505. 
sainthed, 274. 
sake, 129, 443. 
salad, 303. 
sallow = willow, 21, 

128. 
salutation, 298. 
salve, 266. 
Sam, 312, 

same, 330, 321, 409. 
sang, 231. 
sanguine, 80, 349. 
sanitary, 350. 
sank, 231. 
Sanskrit, 13, 488, 

559- 
sap, 266. 
sardonic, 340. 
sat, 107, 231. 
sate, 231. 
satisfy, 2 5 7. 
sauce, 80. 
saucy, 327, 329. 
saugh ( = willow), 21. 
savation, 298. 
save, 80, 178, 442, 
savement, 280, 282. 
Savoyard, 290. 
saw, 476. . 
sawest, 476. 
Saxon Chronicles, 

120, 274, 329, 379, 

437' 506. 
Saxonforms,i7, 277, 

283, 299, 301, 315, 

320, 364, 369, 380, 



383, 394, 400, 408, 
411, 421, 424. 

sayen, 480. 

Scandinavian lan- 
guages, 7, 381, 
495- 

scarify, 257. 

scene, 1 40. 

scent, 140. 

sceptre, 42, 140. 

scholar, 80. 

school, 80. 

science, 80, 140, 296. 

scion, 140, 

scite, 140. 

scituation, 140, 

score, 382. 

scot-ale, 300. 

Scotch, 28. 

Scotticism, 305, 

Scottish, 326. 

Scottish speech, 90, 
187, 408, 410, 538. 

scoundreldom, 272. 

scymitar, 140. 

Scythea, 154. 

sea, 151, 153, 266. 

seal (phoca), 266, 

seam, 266. 

season, 80, 154, 279. 

seasonable, 336. 

seasonal, 339. 

sechestu, 222. 

secondary, 350. 

secret, loi. 

security, 297. 

see, 476. 

seed, 266. 

seeing, 454, 476. 

seek, 247. 

seely, 327. 

seest, seeth, seen, 476. 

seethe, 230. 

seizure, 290. 

seld, 366. 

seldom, 366. 

self, 396. 

self-involved, 511. 

sell, 248. 

Semitic family, 473, 



592 

sempstress, 319, 320. 

send, 253, 254. 

sense, 296. 

sensitive, 348. 

sensual, 339. 

sent, 253, 254. 

sentement, 280, 28 2. 

sentence, 80. 

Sepherus, 120. 

sequence, 296. 

serfdom, 272, 

serpent- throated, 511. 

servant, 80. 

service, 80, 292. 

session, 80. 

settle (a bench), 266. 

Severn, 20. 

-sh, 323, 326. 

shaft, 48, ia8. 

shake, 128, 230. 

shaked, 255. 

shaken, 230. 

Shakspeare, 2, 106, 
122, 148, 153, 183, 
216, 233, 257, 288, 
294, 316, 337, 348, 
436, 439, 443, 521, 
554- 

shalbe, 221. 

shall, 47, 48, 128, 202, 
249, 250, 492. 

shaltu, 221, 

shame, 48, 128. 

shank, 128. 

shape, shapen, 230, 

.237- 

share, 266. 
sharp, 48, 129. 
shave, shaven, 231. 
Shaxper = Shakspeare, 

540. 
she, 108, 396. 
sheaf, 128, 266. 
shear, 48, 231. 
sheath, 48. 
sheep. 44, 128, 266, 

317- 
Shenstone, the poet 

228. 
shew, shewn, 231. 



INDEX. 

shield, 48, 265. 
shilly-shally, 336. 
shine, 231. 
-shion, 279. 
-ship, 268, 275. 
ship, 48, 62, 266. 
ship-mate, 505. 
ship-shape, 336. 
shire, 62. 
shirifdome (Camden), 

272. 
shod, 248. 
shoe, 109, 128, 248, 

266. 
shof, 238. 
shone, 48, 231. 
shooen, 317, 
shook, 230, 235. 
shoon, 316,. 317. 
shoons, 317. 
shoot, 231. 
shope, 230. 
shore, 48, 231. 
shorn, 231. 
short, 48, 128, 256, 

322. 
shorten, 256. 
shot, 48, 231. 
shotten, •231, 235. 
should, 62, 144, 202, 

249, 492. 
shoulders, 48. 
shove, 58, 130, 237. 
shoved, 238. 
shovel, 266. 
shrank, 231. 
shriek, 248. 
shrievalty, 297, 
shrighi, 248. 
shrink, 231. 
shrive, 62. 
shroud, 58. 
shrubbery, 277. 
shrunk, 231. 
shrunken, 231, 324. 
shunned, 48. 
Sibbes, Bichard, 

. 467- 
sick, 322. 
sickle, 43. 



sic-like (Scottish,) 409 
siege, 80, 
sight, 112, 267. 
sighie, 248. 
siht, 112. 
sign, 80. 
signatary, 350. 
sike, 248. 
silky, 327. 
silly, 327. 
silvern, 325. 
simple, 80. 
simplifying, 482. 
sin, 266. 
siNC, 120. 
sincerity, 297. 
sinew-corded, 51 1. 
sing, 231. 
singe, 231. 
sink, 231. 
sire, 80. 
Sir-John, 147. 
sister, 267. 
sisterhood, 274. 
sisteryn, 317. 
sistren, 317. 
sit, 108, 231. 
sith, 453. 
sithence, 441. 
sitten (part.), 231. 
sixpence, sixpences, 

503- 
sixt-thou, 112. 
skill, 36. 
skipper, 268. 
skirmish, 80. 
slacken, 257. 
slain, 231, 

slang (vb.), 231, 235. 
Slang diction, 309, 

313- 
slat, 23T, 
slaughter, 126. 
slay, 231. 
sleep, 237, 248. 
slepestcw, 222. 
slept, 248. 
slew, 231. 
slid, 231. 
slidden, 231. 



1 

Q. ■ 



INDEX. 



593 



slide, ?3l. 

sling, 231. 

slink, 231. 

slipper, 326. 

slippery, 326. 

slit, 231. 

dod, ^31. 

sloe, 109. 

slope, 109. 

slow, 361, 364. 

sluggard, 290. 

slumbrous, 347. 

slung, 231. 

slunk, 231. 

small, 322. 

smite, 231. 

smith, 33, 36, 266. 

smitten, 231. 

smoke, 237. 

smote, 231. 

snail, 265, 266. 

so, 190, 404, 408, 409, 

420, 446. 
so . , . as, 447. 
sober, 80. 
soccage, 284. 
sod. 230, 235. 
sodden, 230. 
soft, 227, 
soil, 88, 129. 
solace, 80, 
sold, 248. 
solemn, 80, 362. 
solicitude, 301. 
solid, 420. 
soliloquize, 258. 
solvent, 350, 351. 
-som, 279. 
some, 206, 231. 
-some, 323, 331, 332 
somebody, 35, 406. 
some folk, 406. 
somnolent, 352, 
some people, 406. 
something, 408. 
somewhen, 430. 
somewhere or other, 

432. 
son, 266. 
-son, 279. 



sonderlypes, 369. 
song, 266. 
songs, 67. 
songster, 320. 
sooth, 322. 
sooth to say, 534. 
sorcery, 277. 
so . . . that, 448. 
sough, 266. 
sought, 247. 
soul, 266. 
sound, III. 
sounding, 80. 
south, 266. 
souverainety, 298. 
soveraintess, 320. 
soverainty, 297. 
sovereign, 42. 
sow, 318. 
space, 80, 
spacious, 346. 
spade, 43, 194. 
spake, 231. 
span, 231. 
Spaniard, 290. 
Spanish, 326. 
Spanish language, 

342, 398, 492. 
spasm, 308. 
spate, 248. 
speak, 231. 
spec, 309. 
special, 80. 
specific, 340. 
speciosity, 297. 
spectacle-bestrid, 507. 
Spectator, The, 447, 

495» 497- 
speculative, 348, 349. 
sped, 254. 
speech, 128. 
speed, 254, 266. 
speedy, 327. 
spend, 80, 254. 
Spenser, 135, 274, 

338, 343. 466, 522. 
spent, 254. 
spet, 248. 
spicery, 277. 
spill, 254. 

Qq 



spilt, 254. 

spin, 231. 

spindlewhorl, 505. 

spinner, 320. 

spinster, 320. 

spirit, 195. 

spit, 248. 

spittle, 266. 

splotch, 311. 

spoke, 231, 236. 

spoken, 231. 

sprang, 231. 

spring, 231. 

sprung, 231. 

spun, 231. 

spurn, 237. . 

spytt, 248. 

squire, 80. 

squirrel, 547. 

stable, 80. 

staff, 266. 

stair, 267. 

stairs, 265. 

stall, 266. 

Stamboul, 223, 

Stanchio, 223. 

stand, 128, 24S. 

standard, 290. 

standers, 288, 

standing, 240. 

Standish, 540. 

stank, 231. 

staple, 12S. 

star, 266. 

stare, 128. 

starvation, 298. 

starve, 237. 

state, 107. 

stationary, 350. 

statute, 80. 

steady, 327. 

steal, 231. 

steedes and palfreys, 81. 

steelly, 330. 

steer, 44, 266. 

step, 129. 

-ster, 320, 

stercoraceous, 347. 

stern, 324. 

Steven (Chaucer), 267., 



594 



INDEX. 



sticcem.5:lum, 367. 
stick, 231. 
stickle, 323. 
stickle-back, 323. 
Sticklepath, 323. 
stigma, 302. 
still, 207, 364, 4r8. 
stimulus, 302. 
sting, 231. 
stink, 231. 
Stoicism, 306. 
stole, 231. 
stolen, 231. 
stone, 266, 356. 
Stonehouse, 540. 
stone- wall, 357. 
Stonewall Jackson, 357. 
stood, 248. 
story, 80, 310. 
stoundemele, 367. 
stow, 266, 
STRAC, 231. 
strait, 80. 
strange, 81. 
stranger, 289. 
stream, 266. 
street, 18. 
strength, 256, 267. 
strengthen, 256. 
Stress, 530. 

STRICAN, 231. 

stricken, 231, 236. 
stride, stridden, 231. 
strike, striken, 231. 
string, 231. 
strive, striven, 231. 
strode, 231. 
strong, 322, 362. 
strove, 231. 
struck, 231. 
strung, 231. 
stuck, 231. 
study, 80. 
stultify, 257. 
stung, 231. 
stunk, 231. 
sturdy, 327. 
subsannation, 299. 
subsidize, 258. 
substance, 80, 296. 



Substantive verb, 

239, 487. 
subtle - cadenced, 504, 

511. 
succeed, -ed, 255. 
succulent, 352. 
such, 403, 404, 408, 

409, 410. 
such ... as, 409. 
such-like, 409. 
such . . . which, 409. 
such . . . who, 409. 
suggestive, 348. 
suicidal, 339. 
sulky, 327. 
sulphuric, 340. 
summer. 267. 
sun, 266. 
sundry, 410. 
sung, 231. 
sung = singe-d, 231, 

235- 
sunk, sunken, 231. 
superfluity, 80. 
superlative, 348. 
supper, 80. 
suppleness, 269. 
supplicatory, 350. 
sure, 362. 

surefootedness, 270. 
surety, 297. 
Stirrey, the poet, 

126, 151, 326. 
suspense, 296. 
Sussex, 27. 
susteini, 61. 
suture, 290, 
swal, 231. 
swallow, 237. 
swam, 231. 
swannery, 277. 
sware, 231. 
swear, 231. 
Swedish, 326. 
Swedish language, 

7, 128. 
sweep, 248. 
sweet, 322. 
sweetish, 327. 
swell, 231. 



swept, 248. 
swift, 322. 
swim, 231. 
swine, 44, 266, 317, 

318. 
swing, 231. 
swollen, 231. 
swore, 231. 
sworn, 231. 
swum, 231. 
swung, 231. 
Symbolic words, 

195, 210, 217. 487. 
symbolize, 258. 
symmetrical, 341. 
Symphytism, 220. 
synonomy, 304. 
systematize, 258. 

tabelment, 280. 

table, 43, 80. 

tackle, 10. 

tail, 10. 

take, 231. 

taken, 231. 

take off, 439. 

tale, 10, 107. 

talented, 33^. 

tilk, 107. 

talker, 288. 

talk of, 454. 

tall, 107. 

Tamar, 20. 

tame, 10, 128. 

tankard, 290. 

tar-barrel, 505. 

tardy, 328. 

tare (vb.), 231. 

tares, 21. 

tarnish, 255. 

tart, 107. 

taught, 248. 

tavern, 80. 

tea, 150. 

teach, 127, 248. 

teacher, 36. 

team, 10. 

tear (subst.), 4, 9, 10, 

154, 266. 
tear (verb), 231. 



INDEX. 



595 



tedious, 346. 
teem, 9. 

teems (Shaksp.), 190. 
teeth, 317. 
telegraphic, 353. 
tell, 10, 248. 
tell him, 475. 
tell me true, 362. 
teirn(Devonshire),22l. 
tempest, 80. 
ten, 4, 9, 10. 
tenement, 280. 
tent, 10, 80. 
term, 80. 
termini, 318. 
terminus, 302. 
terrific, 340. 
terrour, 129. 
tertiary, 350. 
testament, 280. 
testimonial, 300. 
Thames, 20. 
than, 448, 
thane, 267. 
thank, 9. 
thankful, 336. 
thankless, 336. 
thanklesse (Spenser), 

138. 
that, 9, 104, 399, 401, 

402, 411, 412, 413, 

416, 429, 430, 457. 
thatch, 127. 
that . . . that, 401. 
that time, 376. 
that way, 433. 
that . . . which, 401. 
the, 414,415, 416,430. 
the one and the other, 

406. 
the right way, 376. 
the . . . the, 401. 
the which, 401, 403. 
the while, 376. 
the wrong way, 376. 
theatre, 80, 
thee, 9, 108. 
theech, 221. 
their, 413. 
them, 9, 104, 413. 



themselves, 396, 397. 
then, 9, 429, 449. 
theoretic, 353. 
there, 190, 429. 
thereby, 430. 
therefor (American) 

138. 
therefore, 136, 194, 

430. 
these, 412. 
they, 35,194, 398,399, 

405, 406, 413. 
they say, 406. 
thick, 104. 
thick-leaved, 511. 
thief, 266. 
thimble, 266. 
thine, 104, 393. 
thing, 33, 36, 104, 199, 

317,408. 
things, 201, 318. 
think, 9, 248. 
thinker, 288. 
third, 544. 
thirst, 9. 
this, 2, 104, 411, 412, 

413- 
this-e, 412. 
thistle, 21. 
thole, 9. 
thorn, 21. 
thorough, 186. 
those, 412. 
thou, 9, 398. 
though, 9, 112, 113, 

126. 
thought, 248. 
thoughtless, 336. 
thraldom, 272. 
thread, 104. 
threaden, 324. 
three, 9, 100. 
threnody, 305. 
thresh, 237, 
threw, 231. 
thrice, 383. 
thrive, 104, 231, 
thriven, 231, 
throne, 42. 
throng, 237. 
Q q 2 



through, 9, 126. 
throve, 231. 
throw, thrown, 231. 
thumb, 266. 
thunder, 267. 
thunder-struck, 507, 
thy, 415. 
tick (slang), 309. 
tickle, 323, 324. 
tide, 324. 
tide, 10, 257, 266. 
tile, 10, 18, 265, 266. 
till, 9, 10, 138, 439, 

445- 
till then, 439. 
timber, 9, 10, 267. 
time, 262. 
time-piece, 505. 
timidity, 297. 
tinder, 9. 
tinnen, 324, 
-tion, 298. 
to, 10, 37, 109, 391, 

395, 440, 495. 
to-do (Devonshire), 38 1 . 
toe, 109, 129. 
token, 9, 10, 267. 
told, 248. 
tolerable, 336. 
to live on (adv.), 380. 
toll, 10. 
Tom, 312. 
tone, 109. 

tongue, 4, 9, 88, 266. 
tonnage, 283. 
too, 420. 
took, 231, 236. 
tooth, 9, 10, 227, 366. 
too ... to, 446. 
top, 109, 
Tor, 3, 109. 
tore, 231. 
torment, 280. 
torn, 231. 
tornement, 280. 
Tothill, 10. 
tow, 237. 
toward, 33^!- 
towards, 368. 
tower, 80. 



596 



INDEX. 



town-clerk, 505. 
toy, 9. 
Translations, 12, 27, 

205, 207, 218, 363, 

450. 559- 
transcendentalize, 259. 
tray, 154. 
tread, 231. 

treason, 80, 154, 279. 
treasure, 152, 390. 
treasurer, 42. 
tree, 4, 7, 21, 266. 
treen, 324. 
Trent, 20. 
irey, 56. 
trod, 231. 
trodden, 231. 
troop, 36. 
tropical, 34I. 
troth, 82. 
trough, 88. 
trouthe, 82. 
truant, 277. 
truculent, 352. 
true, 322,363. 
trueth (A.V. 161 1), 

124. 
truism, 306. 
trumpery, 277. 
trustee, 289. 
trusteeship, 275. 
trusty, 327. 
truth, 109. 
Tucker, 287. 
-tude, 301. 
Tuesday, lo. 
Turkish, 326. 
turpitude, 301. 
Tweed, ?o. 
twice, 383. 
twinkling, 268. 
two, 4, 9, 100. 
tyrannize, 258. 
tyranny, 80, 304. 
tyrant, 80, 1 19. 

U, the vow^l, 105. 

un-, the prefix, 257, 

424. 
unapproachable, 337. 



unbeliever, 257- 
unborrowed, 424. 
unbuxom, 332. 
unbuxomness, 332. 
unchurch, 425. 
uncle, 190. 

UIKO, 5.:^8. 

unconscionable, 337. 
uncouth, 538. 
uncouthe and strange, 

81. 
undead, 424. 
undescribed, 424. 
undo, 50'->. 

unequall (Spenser), 139. 
unfrock, 257. 
ungodly, 370. 

UNGRENE, 424. 

uniformitarianism, 306. 
unify, 257. 
unjust, 257. 
unlink, 257. 
unlock, 257. 
unmannerly, 330. 
unmeet, 257. 
unset-down, 424. 
unset Steven (Chaucer), 

424. 
unsmotherable, 337. 
untie, 257. 
until, 62, 445. 
untoward, 334. 
up, 364, 417,418. 
upas tree, 505. 
upheaval, 300. 
upon, 440. 
upright, 135. 
uprootal, 300. 
upside down, 432. 
up so down, 432. 
up to a thing, 418. 
up with a person, 418. 
upward, 334. 
upwards, 368, 369. 
urbane, 136. 
urbanity, 297. 
-ure, 290. 
usage, 80. 
use, 262. 
usefulness, 269. 



usher, 262. 
Usk, 20. 
usquebaugh, 20. 
-ustic, 353, 
utilize, 258. 
utter, uttered, 255. 
uze (Spenser), 293.; 

V, the letter, 115. 
vacillate, 255. 
vaine, 115. 
vale, 108. 
valuable, 336, 337. 
value, 337. 
valueless, 337. 
valuing, 337. 
vanity, 297. 
varicose, 348. 
vast, 190. 
vastly, 370, 
vat, 107. 
vaunt, 262. 
veal, 44, 94. 
velocity, 297. 
venerate, 2 5 8. 
venerie, 115. 
venerye, 8 1, 
venison, 44, 279. 
ventriloquism, 305, 

306. 
veray, 115, 
verbiage, 284. 
verdure, 290, 
verier, veriest, 411. 
verily, 34, 190, 370, 

371- 

vermeil-tinctured, 511. 

Versification, G-o- 
thic, and Roman- 
esque, 535. 

versing, 485. 

vesselment, 280. 

vestement, 280. 

very, 80, 330, 410. 

vicarage, 283. 

vicissitude, 301. 

victual, 80. 

villain, 43, 55, 56. 

villainous, 361. 

vine disease, 469. 



vineyard, 505. 
vintner, 287. 
violent, 352. 
virtue, 80, 115. 
virulent, 352. 
visage, J 15. 
visionary, 350' 
visit, 80. 
vixen, 319. 
volcanic, 340. 
vortex, 302. 
voyage, 283. 
vulnerable, 336. 

W, the character, 115. 
wa ! 164. 
wade, 237. 
vi^ain, 266. 
wake, 128, 231. 
wakefull (Spenser), 139, 
wala ! 165. 
Wales, 23. 
walk, 107. 
walker, 288. 
walk fast, 362. 
walk slow, 362. 
wall, 18, 107. 
Wallachia, 24. 
"Wallachian lan- 
guage, 495. 
wallinger, 285. 
Wallis, the Canton, 24. 
Walloons, 24. 
wan, 128. 
wane, 107. 
want, 107. 
ward, 78. 

-ward, 323, 334, 335. 
warden, 78, 277. 
ware, 77- 
ivarentment, 280. 
warfare, 508. 
war-horse, 505. 
warish, 77. 
warlock, 274. 
warm, 324, 362. 
warrior, 36. 
wary, 77. 
was, 232, 478. 
Wash, The, 20. 



INDEX. 

wash (verb), 231, 
washen, 231. 
wash off, 439. 
wastel, 78. 
Wat = Walter, 312. 
water, 10, 20, 107, 267. 
water-course, 522. 
water-hole (Australia), 

505- 
■Watling- Street, 17. 
wave after wave, 376. 
wax, 231. 
waxen, 232, 236. 
way, 266. 
waybread, 21. 
wayward, 334, 
we, 35, 108, 405,406. 
weal and woe, 534. 
weapon, 267. 
weaponed, 332. 
wear, 232. 
vi'EAR'S, 243. 
weariness, 269. 
weather-wise, 507. 
weave, 232, 
Webber, '268. 
Webster, 320, 
wedge, 128, 
wedlock, 273, 508. 
weed, 2 r . 
weedy, 327. 
weep, 248. 
weeping, 67. 
welkin, 267. 
well, 364. 
welladay ! 165. 
wellaway ! 165. 
Welsh, 23, 326. 
"Welsh, 2, 17, 22. 
wend, 253, 254. 
wenestii, 221, 222. 
went, 253, 254. 

WEORDAN, 243. 

wepely, 331. 
wept, 248. 
were, 478. 
WEsAN, 232, 242. 
Wessex, 27. 
west, 266. 
"West-Welsh, 555. 



597 

wether, 266. 
wex, 232, 
whale, 141, 266. 
wharf, 141. 
wharfinger, 285. 
what, 141, 401, 403, 

449. 
whatever, 432. 
whatso, 404, 530. 
what time as, 453. 
wheat, 21, 43, 141. 
wheel, 141, 266. 
whelp, 266, 
when, 141, 429. 
whence, 429, 431, 449. 
whenever, 432. 
whensoever, 432. 
where, 141, 194, 429, 

448. 
whereas, 448. 
wherefore, 457. 
wherethrough, 429. 
whether, 448. 
which, 141, 401, 402, 

403, 410, 449. 450. 
which way, that way, 

433- 
whight (Spenser), 126. 
while, 91, 92. 188. 
whilome, 366. 
whilst, 92. 
whimsical, 341. 
whin, 21. 
whiskey, 20. 
whisper, loi. 
whit, 408, 428. 
Whitby, 240, 
white, 10. 

Whitechapel-bred, 522. 
white-handed, 511. 
whither, 141, 429. 
who, 141, 401, 403, 

449. 450. 
whole, 141, 322. 
wholesome, 331. 
whom, 401, 403, 449. 
whome = home, 141. 
whose, 401, 449. 
whoso, 404, 530. 
whote = hot, 141, 142. 



598 



INDEX. 



why, 429. 
wicked, 332. 
wickedness, 85. 
wicker, 326. 
wicket, 20. 
"Wiclif, 227, 405,421, 

432. 
Wicliffists, 302. 
Wiclifite, 302, 
wide, 256. 
widen, 257. 
widowhood, 274. 
width, 267. 
wield, 237. 
WIF, 318. 
wife, 266. 
wight, 267, 408. 
wilderness, 269. 
wilding, 329. 
Will, 312. 
will (symbol-verb), 202, 

249, 250, 492. 
willeth, 237. 
will-o'-the-wisp, 514. 
willow, 21. 
wiltu, 222. 
wilyness, 85, 
win, 232. 
Winchester, 20. 
wind, 232, 266. 
wine, 109. 
wine-glass, 515. 
wing, 262. 
winsome, 331. 
winter, 267. 
wire, 182. 
wis (? verb), 248. 
-wis, 346. 
Wisbech, 20. 
wisdom, 272. 
wise, 83. 

wise and wary, 534. 
wishy-washy, 336, 
wist, 248. 

WISTE, 248. 

wit, 108. 

wit and wisdom, 534. 
witchery, 277. 
wite - word ( = testa- 
ment), 283. 



with, 38. 

with a good will, 374. 

withal, 432. 

with one accord, 374. 

without, 440. 

without ceasing, 374. 

without distraction, 

374- 
without effort, 377. 
without thought, 377. 
withstand, 38, 509. 
wittol, 324. 
wives, 318. 
wizard, 290, 293. 
wize (Spenser), 293. 
wo, 81, 164. 
woe, 129. 
woke, 231. 
wold, 266. 
wolf, 266. 
woman, 539. 
womb, 266, 
won, 232. 
wonder, 255, 267. 
wondered, 255. 
wonderfully, 366. 
wonnes (Spenser), 1 38. 
wood, 7, 2T, 266. 
wooden, 324, 325. 
woodhouse, 520. 
woollen, 324. 
word, 33, 35, 318. 
word of command, 514. 
"Word-painting, 560. 
words, 318. 
wore, 232. 
work, 248. 
workmanship, 275. 
world, 266. 
worm, 266, 
wormwood, 21. 
worn, 232. 
worship, 275. 
wort, 2 r . 
worth (adj.), 322. 
worth (subst.),244. 
worth (verb), 243, 489. 
worthily and to great 

purpose, 373. 
worthy, 185.. 



worthyness, 85. 

wot, 248. 

would, 146, 202, 249, 

492. 
wound, 232. 
wove, 232. 
woven, 232. 
WRiEc, 236. 
wrat = wrote, 232, 2 3 'S, 
wrath, 141. 
wreak, 141, 232, 236. 
wreath, 141. 
WRECE, 236. 

WRECEN, 236. 

wrestle, 141. 
wretch, 127, 142. 
wretched, 332. 
wretchlessness, 141. 
Wright, 141, 
wriht (Chaucer), 81. 
wring, 232. 
wrist, 141. 
write, 141, 232. 
write off, 439, 
write slow, 361. 
writing, 485. 
written, 232. 
wrote, 232, 236, 
wrote = root, 141. 
wrought, 142, 248. 
wrung, 232. 
wultu, 221. 
wush (Scottish), 231. 
Wykehamists, 30 2 , 30 7 . 

X, the letter, 116. 

Y, the letter, 117, 

-y (terminal), 304,323, 

327, 328. 
yable (Dorset), 118, 
yachen (Dorset), 1 18. 
yacre (Dorset), 118. 
yakker (Dorset), 118. 
yale (Dorset), 118. 
yarbs (Dorset), 118. 
yard, 117, 266. 
yare, in, 117. 
yarm (Dorset), 118. 
yarn (Dorset), 118. 



INDEX, 



599 



yamest (Dorset), Ii8, 
yarrow, 21. 
ychain'd, 479. 
yclept, 479. 
ye, III, 117. 
ye ( = the), 104. 
yea. 149. 
yean, 118. 
yeaning- time, 505. 
year, iii, 117, r54, 

266. 
yearling, 330. 
yearn, 117. 
yeaze (Dorset), 1 18. 
yell, 262. 
yellow, 149, 
yellow-girted, 511. 
yelp, 117. 
Yenton, 541. 



yeoman, 129. 
yes, 117, 400. 
yes sure, 362. 
yet, III, 117,459. 
yeve (Chaucer), 11 1. 
yew, 21. 
yield, 117, 255. 
yielded, 255. 
yoke, 266. 
yoke-fellow, 505. 
York, 20, 1 18. 
yote ( = pour), 237. 
you, 35, 194, 398, 405. 
young, 88, 118, 129, 

322. 
youngster, 320. 
your, 393. 
your grace, 388. 
your highness, 388. 



388, 



your honour, 388 
your lordship, 

398- 

your majesty, 388. 
ypointing, 479. 
y* ( = that), 104. 
ywroken (Spenser), 

232, 236. 

z, the letter, 1 20. 
zealous, 346. 
zeir (Scottish), 117. 
zenith, 304. 
zephyr, 119, 
zinc, 120. 
zit (Scottish). 117. 
zork (Scottish), 118. 



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of Oriel College, Oxford. 

Homer. Odyssey, Books I-XII (for Schools). By W. W. 

Merry, M. A., Fellow and Lecturer of Lincoln College, Oxford. Ext. fcap. 8vo. 
clpth, ifS. 6d. 



Clarcndoii Press Series. 



Homer. Odyssey, Books I-XII. By W. W. Merry, M.A., 

Fellow and Lecturer of Lincoln College, Oxford ; and the late James Riddell, 
M.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. 

Homer. Odyssey, Books XIII-XXIV. By Robinson Ellis, 

M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 

Plato. Selections (for Schools). With Notes, by B. Jowett, 

M.A., Regius Professor of Greek; and J. Purves, M.A., Fellow and Lecturer 
of Balliol College, Oxford. 



Sophocles. Oedipus Rex: Dindorf's Text, with Notes by 

the Ven. Archdeacon Basil Jones, M. A., formerly Fellow of University College, 
Oxford. Secofid Editioji. Ext. fcap. 8vo. limp cloth, is. 6d. 



Sophocles. By Lewis Campbell, M.A., Professor of Greek, 

St. Andrews, formerly Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, hi (he Press 

Theocritus (for Schools). With Notes, by H. Snow, MA., 

Assistant Master at Eton College, formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cam- 
bridge. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, ^s. td. 

Xenophon. Selections (for Schools). With Notes and 

Maps, by J. S. Phillpotts, B.C.L., Assistant Master in Rugby School, formerly 
Fellow of New College, Oxford. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, y. (,d. 

Caesar. The Commentaries (for Schools). Part I. The 

Gallic War, with Notes and Maps, &c.,by Charles E. Moberly, M.A., Assistant 
Master in Rugby School; formerly Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford. Ext. 
fcap. 8vo. cloth, 4s. 6d. 

Also, to follow : Part II. The Civil War : by the same Editor. 

Cicero's Philippic Orations. With Notes, by J. R. King, 

M.A., formerly Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford. Demy Svo. 
clorh, los. 6d. 

Cicero pro Cluentio. With Introduction and Notes. By 

W. Ramsay, M.A. Edited by G. G. Ramsay, M.A., Professor of Humanity, 
Glasgow. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, y. 6d. 

Cicero. Selection of interesting and descriptive passages. 

With Notes. By Henry Walford, M.A., Wadham College, Oxford, Assistant 
Master at Haileybury College. In three Parts. Ext. fcap. Svo. cloth, 4s. 6d. 

Also sold separately. 
Part I. Anecdotes from Grecian and Roman History, cloth, is. 6d. 
Part II. Omens and Dreams : Beauties of Nature, cloth, is. 6d. 
Part IK. Rome's Rule of her Provinces, cloth, is. 6d. 

Cicero. Select Letters. By Albert Watson, M.A., Fellow 

and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. Demy Svo. cloth, i8j. 

Cicero de Oratore. With Introduction and Notes. By 

A. S. Wilkins, M.A., Professor of Latin, Owens College, Manchester. 



Claj-endon Press Series. 



Cicero and Pliny. Select Epistles (for Schools). With 



Cornelius Ifepos. With Notes, by Oscar Browning. M.A., 

Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Assistant Master at Eton College. 
Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, ■zs. 6d. 

Horace. With Notes and Introduction. By Edward C. 

Wickham, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford. 
Also a small edition for Schools. 

Livy, Books I-X. By J. R. Seeley, M. A., Fellow of Christ's 



8vo. cloth, 6s. 
Also a small editi 



1 for Schools. 



Ovid. Selections for the use of Schools. With Introduc- 
tions and Notes, and an Appendix on the Roman Calendar. By W. Ramsay, 
M.A. Edited by G. G. Ramsay, M.A., Professor of Humanity, Glasgow. Ext. 
fcap. 8vo. cloth, ss. 6d. 

Fragments and Speciraens of Early Latin. With Intro- 
duction, Notes, and Illustrations. By John Wordsworth, M.A., Brasenose 
College, Oxford. 

Selections from the less known Latin Poets. By North 

Finder, M.A., formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. Demy 8vo. cloth. 

Passages for Translation into Latin. For the use of 

Passmen and others. Selected by J. Y. Sargent, M.A., Tutor, formerly Fellow, 
of Magdalen College, Oxford. Secotid Edition. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 2S. 6d. 

II. MEISTTAL AND MOBAL PHILOSOPHY. 
The Elements of Deductive Logic, designed mainly for 

the use of Junior Students in the Universities. By T. Fowler, M.A., Fellow 
and Tutor of Lincoln College, Oxford. Fourth Edition, with a Collection of 
Examples. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, y. 6d. 

The Elements of Inductive Logic, designed mainly for 

the use of Students in the Universities. By the same Author. Ext. fcap. 8vo. 
cloth, 6s. 

A Manual of Political Economy, for the use of Schools. 

By J. E. Thorold Rogers, M.A., formerly Professor of Political Economy, 
Oxford. Second Edition. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 4J. 6d. 



III. MATHEMATICS, &c. 

Acoustics. By W. F. Donkin, M.A,, F.R.S., Savilian Pro- 
fessor of Astronomy, Oxford. Crown 8vo. cloth, yj. 6d. 



Clarendon Press Series. 



An Elementary Treatise on Quaternions. By P. G. 

Tait, M.A., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh ; 
formerly Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge. Demy 8vo. cloth, t.2s. 6d. 

Book-keeping. By R. G. C. Hamilton, Accountant to the 

Board of Trade, and John Ball (of the Firm of Messrs. Quilter, Ball, & Co.), 
,, . , . . ., ^__._ .r '--ts' Exam' '■ "" ' ' 



I Book-keeping for the Society of Arts' Examination. Third 
Edition. Ext. fcap. 8vo. //;«/ cloth, js. 6d. 

A Course of Lectures on Pure Geometry. By Henry J. 

Stephen Smith, M.A., F.R.S., Fellow of Balliol College, and Savilian Professor 
of Geometrj' in the University of Oxford. 

A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. By J. Clerk 

Maxwell, M.A., F.R.S., formerly Professor of Natural Philosophy, King's Col- 
lege, London. /?t the Press. 



IV. HIS TOBY. 
A Manual of Ancient History. By George Rawlinson, 

M.A., Camden Professor of Ancient History, formerly Fellow of Exeter College, 
Oxford. Demy 8vo. cloth, i+r. 

Select Charters and other Illustrations of English 

Constitutional History from tlie Earliest Times to the reign of Edward I. 
By W. Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University 
of Oxford. Crown 8vo. cloth, Zs. 6d. 

A Constitutional History of England. By W. Stubbs, 

M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. 

A History of Germany and of the Empire, down to the 

close of the Middle Ages. By J. Bryce, B.C.L., Fellow of Oriel College, 
Oxford. 

A History of Germany, from the Reformation. By Adol- 

phus W. Ward, M.A., Fellow of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, Professor of 
History, Owens College, Manchester. 

A History of British India. By S.J. Owen, M.A , Lee's 

Reader in Law and History, Christ Church, and Teacher of Indian Law and 
History in the University of Oxford. 

A History of Greece. By E. A. Freeman, M.A., formerly 

Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 

A History of France. By G, W. Kitchin, M.A., formerly 

Censor of Christ Church. 

V. LA^W. 

Elements of Law for the use of Students. By William 

Markby, M.A., one of the Justices of the High Court of Judicature, Calcutta. 
Nearly ready. 

Commentaries on Roman Law ; from the original and the 

best modem sources. By H. J. Roby, M.A., formerly Fellow of St. John's 
College, Cambridge ; Professor of Law at University College, London. 



Clarendon Press Series. 



VI. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 

Natural Philosophy. In four volumes. By Sir W. Thom- 
son, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., Professor of Natural Philosophy, Glasgow; and 
P. G. Tait, M.A., Professor of Natural Philosophy, Edinburgh; formerly Fel- 
lows of St. Peter's College, Cambridge. Vol. I. 8vo. cloth, iL 5J. 

By the same Authors, a smaller Work on the same subject, 

forming a complete Introduction to it, so far as it can be carried out with 
Elementary Geometry and Algebra. /;z the Press. 

Descriptive Astronomy. A Handbook for the General 

Reader, and also for practical Observatory work. With 224 illustrations and 
numerous tables. By G. F. Chambers, F.R.A.S., Barrister-at-Law. Demy 8vo. 
856 pp., cloth, il. zs. 

Chemistry for Students. By A. W. Williamson, Phil. 

Doc, F. R.S., Professor of Chemisti-y, University College, London. A neit; 
Edition, with Solutions. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 8j. 6d. 

A Treatise on Heat, with numerous Woodcuts and Dia- 
grams. By Balfour Stewart, LL.D., F.R.S., Director of the Observatory at 
Kew. Second Edition. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, js. 6d. Jiist published. 

Forms of Animal Life. By G. Rolleston, M.D., F.R.S., 

Linacre Professor of Physiologj', Oxford. Illustrated by Descriptions and 
Drawings of Dissections. Demy 8vo. cloth, i6j. 

Exercises in Practical Chemistry. By A. G. Vernon 

Harcourt, M.A., F.R.S., Senior Student of Christ Church, and Lee's Reader 
in Chemistry ; and H. G. Madan, M.A., Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. 

Series I. Qualitative Exercises. Crown 8vo. cloth, js. 6d. 
Series II. Quantitative Exercises. 

The Valley of the Thames : its Physical Geography and 

Geolog-y. By John Phillips, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geology, Oxford. 
In the Press. 

Geology. By J. Phillips, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geo- 

logy, Oxford. 

Mechanics. By Bartholomew Price, MA., F.R S., Sedleian 

Professor of Natural Philosophy, Oxford. 

Optics. By R. B. Clifton, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Experi- 

mental Philosophy, Oxford ; formerly Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. 

Electricity. By W. Esson, M.A., F.R.S., Fellow and 

Mathematical Lecturer of T/Ierton College, Oxford. 

Crystallography. By M. H. N. Story-Maskelyne, MA., 

Professor of Mineralogy, Oxford ; and Deputy Keeper in the Department of 
Minerals, British Museum. 



Mineralogy. By the same Author. 



Clarendon Press Series. 



Physiological Physics. By G. Griffith, MA., Jesus Col- 

lejje, Oxford, Assistant Secretary to tlie British Association," and Natural 
Science Master at Harrow School. 

Magnetism. 

VII. ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 
A First Reading Book. By Marie Eichens of Berlin ; and 

edited by Anne J. Clout;li. Ext. fcap. 8vo. stiff covers. Ad. 

Oxford Reading Book, Part I. For Little Children. 

Ext. fcap. Svo. siiff covers, 6d. 

Oxford Reading Book, Part II. For Junior Classes. 

Ext. fcap. Svo. stiff coolers, 6d. 

On the Principles of Grammar. By E. Thring, M.A., 

Head Master of Uppingham School. Ext. fcap. Svo. cioth, 4s. 6d, 

Grammatical Analysis, designed to serve as an Exercise 

and Composition Book in the Enj^lish Lang^uage. By E. Thring, M.A.. Head 
Master of Uppingham School. Ext. fcap. Svo. ctof^, 3J. 6d. 

Specimens of Early English ; being a Series of Extracts 

from the most important English Authors, Chronologically arranged, illustrative 
of the progress of the English Language and its Dialectic varieties, from A.D. 
1250 to .\.D. 1400. With Grammatical Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. By 
R. Morris, Editor of " The Story of Genesis and Exodus," &c. Ext. fcap. Svo. 
cloth, ys. 6d. 

Specimens of English from a.d. 1394 to a.d. 1579 (from 

the Crede to Spenser): selected by W. W. Skeat, M.A., formerly Fellow of 
Christ's College, Cambridge. /« t/te Press. 

The Vision of V(7"illiam concerning Piers the Plowman, 

by William Langland. Edited, with Notes, by W. W. Skeat, M.A., formerly 
Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. Ext. fcap. Svo. c/ot/t, 4s. 6d. 

The Philology of the English Tongue. By J. Earle, 

M.A., formerly Fellow of Oriel College, and Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Oxford. 
Ext. fcap. Svo. doth, 6s. bd. Jiist published. 

Typical Selections from the best English Authors from the 

Sixteenth to tlie Nineteenth Century, (to ser^'e as a higher Reading Book,) with 
Introductory Notices and Notes, being a Contribution towards a History of 
English Literature. Ext. fcap. Svo. cloth, \s. bd. 

Specimens of the Scottish Language; being a Series of 

Annotated Extracts illustrative of the Literature and Philology of the Lowland 
Tongue from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century. With Introduction 
and Glossary. By A. H. Burgess, M.A. 

See also XII. below for other English Classics. 

VIII. FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 

Brachet's Historical Grammar of the French Language. 

Translated by G. W. Kitchin, M.A., formerly Censor of Christ Churcn. Ext. 
fcap. Svo. cloth, y. bd. 



Clarendon Press Set 



An Etymological Dictionary of the French Language, with 

a Preface on the Principles of French Etymology. By A. Brachet. 1 ranslated 
by G. W. Kitchin, M. A., formerly Censor of Christ Church, hi the Press. 

Comeille's Cinna, and Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes. 

Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Gustave Masson. Ext. fcap. 8vo. 
cloth, 2J. dd. 

Kacine's Andromaque, and Comeille's Le Menteur. With 

Louis Racine's Life of his Father. By the same Editor. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 
2S. 6rf. 

Moliere's Les Fourberies de Scapin, and Racine's Athalie. 

V\'ith Voltaire's Life of Moliere. By the same Editor. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 
2s. 6d. 

Selections from the Correspondence of Madame de Sevigne 

and her chief Contemporaries. Intended more especially for Girls' Schools. 
By the same Editor. Kxt. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 3s. 

Voyage autour de ma Chambre, by Xavier de Maistre ; 

Uurika, by MADAME DE DURAS; La Dot de Suzette, by FlEVEE ; Les Ju- 
meaux de i'Hotel Corneille, by Edmond ABOUT ; Mesaventnres dun Ecolier, 
by P.ODOLPHE TOPFFER. By the same Editor. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 2s. bd. 



A Complete Theory of the French 

1 French and Eng-lish, and numerous Examples to 
' : Language. By Jules Bue, Honorary M.A. of 



A French Grammar. 

Language, with the rules ii 

serve as first Exercises in 

Oxford ; Taylorian Teacher of French, Oxford': Examiner in the Oxford Local 

Examinations from 1S58. 

A French Grammar Test. A Book of Exercises on French 

Grammar; each Exercise being preceded by Grammatical Questions. By the 
same Author. 

Exercises in Translation No. i, from French into English, 

with general rules on Translation ; and containing Notes, Hints, and Cautions, 
fotmded on a comparison of the Grammar and Genius of the two Languages. 
By the same Author. 

Exercises in Translation No. 2, from English into French, 

on the same plan as the preceding book. By the same Author. 



IX. GERMAnsr LAISTGUAGE AND LITERATUIIE. 
Goethe's Egmont. With a Life of Goethe, &c. By Dr. 

Buchheim, Professor^of the German Language and Literature in King's Col- 
lege, London ; and lixaminer in German to the University of London. Extra 
fcap. 8vo. cloth, 3J. 

Schiller's Wllhelm Tell. With a Life of Schiller ; an histo- 
rical and critical Introduction, Arguments, and a complete Commentary. By 
the same Editor. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 3J. 6d. 

Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm. A Comedy. With a Life 

of Lessing, Critical Commentary, &c. By the same Editor. 



Clarendon Press Series. 



X. ART, &c. 

A Handbook of Pictorial Art. By R. St. J. Tyrwhitt, 

M.A., formerly Student and Tutor of Christ Church, Oxford. With coloured 
Illustrations, Photogfraphs, and a chapter on Perspective by A. Macdonald. 
8vo. half morocco, i8j. 

A Treatise on Harmony. By Sir F. A. Gore Ouseley, 

Bart., M.A., Mus. Doc, Professor of Music in the University of Oxford. 410. 

cloth, IQS. 

A Treatise on Counterpoint, Canon, and Fugue, based 

upon that of Cherubini. By the same Author. 4to. cloth, 16s. 



XI. MISCELLANEOUS. 

The Modern Greek Language in its relation to Ancient 

Greek. By E. M. Geldart, B.A., formerly Scholar of Balliol College, O.xford. 
Extr. fcap. 8vo. clotli, 4J. 6<.i. 

The Cultivation of the Speaking Voice. By John Hullah. 

Crown 8vo. cloth, ^s. 6d. 

A System of Physical Education : Theoretical and Prac- 
tical. By Archibald Maclaren, The Gymnasium, Oxford. Extra fcap. 8vo. 
cloth, 7 J. M. 



XII. A SERIES OF ENGLISH CLASSICS. 

Designed to meet the <wants of Students in English Lite- 
rature : under the superintendence of the Rev. J. S. 
Brewer, M.A., of Queen's College, Oxford, and Professor 
of English Literature at King's College, London. 

There are two dangers to which the student of English Lite- 
rature is exposed at the outset of his task ; — his reading is apt to 
be too narrow or too diffuse. 

Out of the vast number of authors set before him in books 
professing to deal with this subject he knows not which to select : 
he thinks he must read a little of all ; he soon abandons so hope- 
less an attempt ; he ends by contenting himself with second-hand 
information ; and professing to study English Literature, he fails 
to master a single English author. On the other hand, by con- 



Clarendon Press Series. 



13 



fining his attention to one or two writers, or to one special period 
of English Literature, the student narrows his view of it ; he fails 
to grasp the subject as a whole ; and in so doing misses one of 
the chief objects of his study. 

How may these errors be avoided ? How may minute reading 
be combined with comprehensiveness of view ? 

In the hope of furnishing an answer to these questions the 
Delegates of the Press, acting upon the advice and experience of 
Professor Brewer, have determined to issue a series of small 
volumes, which shall embrace, in a convenient form and at a 
low price, the general extent of English Literature, as repre- 
sented in its masterpieces at successive epochs. It is thought 
that the student, by confining himself, in the first instance, to 
those authors who are most worthy of his attention, will be 
saved from the dangers of hasty and indiscriminate reading. By 
adopting the course thus marked out for him, he will become 
familiar with the productions of the greatest minds in English 
Literature ; and should he never be able to pursue the subject 
beyond the limits here prescribed, he will have laid the founda- 
tion of accurate habits of thought and judgment, which cannot 
fail of being serviceable to him hereafter. 

The authors and works selected are such as will best serve to 
illustrate English Literature in its historical aspect. As ' the eye 
of history,' without which history cannot be understood, the 
literature of a nation is the clearest and most intelligible record 
of its life. Its thoughts and its emotions, its graver and its less 
serious modes, its progress, or its degeneracy, are told by its best 
authors in their best words. This view of the subject will sug- 
gest the safest rules for the study of it. 



With one exception all writers before the Reformation are 
excluded from the Series. However great. may be the value of 



14 Clarendon Press Series. 



literature before that epoch, it is not completely national. For 
it had no common organ of language ; it addressed itself to 
special classes ; it dealt mainly with special subjects. Again ; of 
writers who flourished after the Reformation, who were popular 
in their day, and reflected the manners and sentiments of their 
age, the larger part by far must be excluded from our list. 
Common sense tells us that if young persons, who have but a 
limited time at their disposal, read Marlowe or Greene, Burton, 
Hakewill or Du Bartas, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton will be 
comparatively neglected. 

Keeping, then, to the best authors in each epoch — and here 
popular estimation is a safe guide — the student will find the fol- 
lowing list of writers amply sufficient for his purpose : Chaucer, 
Spenser, Hooker, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Bunyan, 
Pope, Johnson, Burke, and Cowper. In other words, Chaucer is 
the exponent of the Middle Ages in England ; Spenser of the 
Reformation and the Tudors ; Hooker of the latter years of 
Elizabeth ; Shakespeare and Bacon of the transition from Tudor 
to Stuart ; Milton of Charles I and the Commonwealth ; DrydA 
and Bunyan of the Restoration ; Pope of Anne and the House 
of Hanover ; Johnson, Burke, and Cowper of the reign of 
George HI to the close of the last century. 

The list could be easily enlarged ; the names of Jeremy 
Taylor, Clarendon, Hobbes, Locke, Swift, Addison, Goldsmith, 
and others are omitted. But in so wide a field, the difficulty is 
to keep the series from becoming unwieldy, without diminishing 
its comprehensiveness. Hereafter, should the plan prove to be 
useful, some of the masterpieces of the authors just mentioned 
may be added to the list. 

The task of selection is not yet finished. For purposes of 
education, it would neither be possible, nor, if possible, desirable, 
to place in the hands of students the whole of the works of the 



Clarendon Press Series. 



15 



authors we have chosen. We must set before them only the 
masterpieces of literature, and their studies must be directed, not 
only to the greatest minds, but to their choicest productions. 
These are to be read again and again, separately and in combina- 
tion. Their purport, form, language, bearing on the times, must 
be minutely studied, till the student begins to recognise the full 
value of each work both in itself and in its relations to those that 
go before and those that follow it. 

It is especially hoped that this Series may prove useful to 
Ladies' Schools and Middle Class Schools ; in which English 
Literature must always be a leading subject of instruction. 



By Professor 



A General Introduction to the Series. 

Brewer, M.A. 



1. Chaucer. The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales ; The 

Knightes Tale; The Nonne Prest his Tale. Edited by R. Morris, Editor for 
the Early English Text Society, &c., &c. Second Editioti. Extra fcap. 8vo. 
cloth, 2s. 6d. 

2. Spenser's Faery Queene. Books I and II. Designed 

chiefly for the use of Schools. With Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. By 
G. W. Kitchin, M.A., formerly Censor of Christ Church. Extra fcap. 8vo. 
clot/i, 2S. 6d. each. 

3. Hooker. Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I. Edited by R. W. 

Church, M.A., Rector of Whatley ; formerly Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. 
Extra fcap. 8vo. cloi/t, 2s. 

4. Shakespeare. Select Plays. Edited by W. G. Clark, 

M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; and W. Aldis Wright, M.A., 
Trinity College, Cambridge. 

I. The Merchant of Venice. Extra fcap. 8vo. stiff covers, xs. 

II. Richard the Second. Extra fcap. 8vo. stiff covers, is. 6d. 

III. Macbeth. Extra fcap. 8vo. stiff covers, is. 6d. 



5. Bacon. Advancement of Learning. 

Wright, M.A. Extra fcap. 8vo. cloth, 45-. 6d. 



Edited by W. Aldis 



6. Milton. Poems. Edited by R. C Browne, M.A., and 

Associate of King's College, London. 2 vols. Ext. fcap. 8vo. cloth, 6s. 6d, 
Sold separately, Vol I. 4J., Vol. II. y. 



1 6 Clarendon Press Series. 



7. Dry den. Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell ; 

Astraea Redux ; Annus Miiabilis ; Absalom and Achitophel ; Religio Laici ; 
The Hind and the Panther. Edited by W. D. Christie, M.A., Trinity CoUege, 
Cambridge. Extra fcap. 8vo. cloth, 3^. 6d. 

8. Bunyan. Grace Abounding; The Pilgrim's Progress. 

Edited by E. Venables, M. A., Canon of Lincoln. 

9. Pope. With Introduction and Notes. By Mark Pattison, 

B. D. , Rector of Lincoln College. Oxford. 
I. Essay on Man. Extra fcap. 8vo. stiff covers, is. 6d. 
IL Epistles and Satires. In the Press. 

10. Johnson. Rasselas; Lives of Pope and Dryden. Edited 

by C. H. O. Daniel, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of Worcester College, Oxford. 

11. Burke. Thoughts on the Present Discontents; the Two 

Speeches on America ; Reflections on the French Revolution. By Mark Patti- 
son, B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. 

12. Cowper. The Task, and some of his minor Poems. 

Edited by J. C. Shairp, M.A., Principal of the United College, St. Andrews. 



Published for the University by 
MACMILLAN AND CO., LOK"DO]Sr. 



The Delegates of the Press invite suggestions and advice 
from all persons interested i?i education; and will be thankful 
for hints, <tc., addressed to either the Rev. G. W. Kitchin, 
St. Giles's Road East, Oxford, or the Secretary to the 
Delegates, Clarendon Press, Oxford. 



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